Wondelone

How We Used To See The World

2010-01-06T13:03:00.000-08:00

They say that when Native Americans saw their first horse they called it the “big dog.” They rubbed the sweat of this new and strange animal on their own bodies so they could acquire its magic. Bernal Diaz del Castillo accompanied Cortes in his 1519 incursion into Mexico. He wrote "The natives had never seen horses up to this time and thought the horse and rider were all one animal. "

What would it be like to see the “big dog” for the first time?

The ground thunders… you’re used to that-- but instead of buffalo you are shocked to see a new shape on the horizon! Long flowing hair, a powerful neck, a flash of muscle and color… And if a man were on it’s back the illusion would be even stranger… an animal with two faces! But wait… Now you see them separate… Still-- it’s no less amazing—a man can take an animal and make it act as better legs for him. A man can fly across the plains now. Your body has never gone that fast before! You blink-- you gulp and gasp—trying to catch your breath as wind blasts in your face. To domesticate so large an animal, to make him an extension of your own will-- only more powerful, this had to be more than just a good day for an Indian. This would be a paradigm shift. The whole world would suddenly be wild and strange.

When my daughter Leah was about a year old she could say “moon.” We would get out of the car at night and while walking to the front door I would point up to that big white circle glowing in the sky and she would say it—“Moon!” Part of me felt like I had started to drain the thing of wonder by telling her it’s name. Moon. That’s the moon. I wonder what she would have called it?

What did people used to call it? It’s funny because Leah doesn’t have a whole lot of time to be amazed at this thing before a whole world of pre-packaged information comes in and starts educating her about what it really is. It’s the moon. That’s all. We’ve known about that thing for a long time now. There was a time when a man could stand on the beach and look out at where the sea meets the sky and wonder, what the hell is over there? If I got on a boat and just kept going—where would I end up?” Now we know—if you go that way you’ll hit Europe. You go that way you end up over there and we’ve been there before. We’ve known about that for a long time too. There was a time when a man and his one year old daughter could look at the moon and both of them not have a clue what it was they were looking at. Leah, my daughter, is eight now. She’s doing school and she has lots of books that tell her what everything is. That’s fine. That’s what’s supposed to happen I suppose, but it’s also like watching a leak… Something is leaving her.

When we are nostalgic about childhood what exactly is it that are we’re nostalgic for? I know it has a lot to do with being carefree, not knowing or caring where the next meal is coming from or how the bills will be paid, but it has to do with a lot of other things too. When you’re a baby your whole universe is the nursery and the house you live in. Your toys occupy this universe-- that Fisher-Price dog with wheels on a string that you drag around, those pictures of bears having a picnic on your sheets. It’s all familiar, wonderful, and personal.

Then the universe gets a little bigger. You are old enough to go outside, go across the street. See your friends. Go to their house. See their toys. Still, it’s a pretty small universe and you really have no idea where you are in proportion to the rest of the world. Years pass, and somewhere along the line, as we go more places and see more things, the mystery of our world gets lost—whether we actually get to see everything or not.

Leah is learning about Europe. I’ve never been to Europe. Still, I teach her that it’s there and I should. It’s what I’m supposed to do. So much of the world is told to us. It’s packaged in glossy books with maps and explanations. The moon is made of rock. It orbits the earth. The earth orbits the sun. The sun is only one star among zillions. Very rarely do we see the sun for the huge bright terror that it is, that enormous thing that goes up on one side and down another in a blaze of color and strange light. Part of the wonder of childhood is having no idea what things are or how they work. This delights us and scares us. I used to take one of Leah’s stuffed animals and make it pop up from behind the couch only to disappear again. Basic peek-a-boo stuff and she loved it. And from her perspective it was pretty amazing-- “The dog was there a second ago and now… now it’s GONE!” Gone! But look! Now it’s back again! Amazing!” And it is amazing. When we grow up the universe is still big I suppose but it feels smaller too. There is really no need to go to the moon since someone else has already been there and done that. There are books and documentaries and photos that will tell us all about it. We know how the world works. People figured it out a long time ago. So we tend to walk around as people knowing everything about everything. The wonder is gone. Our new novelties are things that we make. Technology. TV shows. The latest cutting edge sound in music. What’s in fashion—how are they wearing boots this spring? And then there are movies-- People used to watch movies and talk about how real they were. Now we live life and talk about how much like the movies it is.

Novelty—we need more and more of it, but how quickly we grow accustomed to wonders. Today’s miracle is tomorrow’s rut. King Solomon himself said that “the eye never has enough seeing, nor the ear enough hearing” and then lamented “everything is wearisome, more than one can tell!” It’s the best we can do to try to put “fresh eyes” on an old thing. We go hiking and make an intense effort to breathe in the air and to take it all in. It’s funny though—I never enjoyed the outdoors more than when I was a kid and I never had to work that hard for it. It was effortless in those days. I was just as wild and mysterious in my joy as those trees I would climb or those cats I would chase.

We have so completely exhausted our world that we feel trapped by it—almost claustrophobic, like being stranded in a cheap apartment, without a car to take us someplace else. There certainly must be more to explore—small corners of the earth yet undiscovered, the recesses of the deep. And how about outer space? Now there’s something to think about… I’ve heard a lot of people put their hope in this final mystery, the mystery of the stars, but I’m not sure what they’re hoping to find out there. What do we think these new novelties will provide that the others could not? So we see new stuff or maybe even new life… Pretty amazing—but I’m not sure how that will change what is basic about human beings. A new enlightenment? Enlightenment to what exactly? Whatever the human condition is, it seems we take it with us wherever we go. A man makes his home on Mars and, after having his token moment of euphoria, sits down again and starts fumbling around for a magazine to read.

The internet was supposed to change our world but I’m not sure how it has— it’s another outlet for our boredom and I can get pretty bored with the internet. In the same way, outer space is just another change of scenery—somewhere else for us to be what we essentially are. On Mars men and women will still get tired of their partners and want to trade up. We’ll sigh and dart our eyes as we always do-- weary of every moment and hungry for the next. World without end…

So what is it that we really want? What is all of this stumbling about for? It seems we have a wonder need and nothing can fill it.

I suppose part of this lack of wonder has to do with the kind of questions we are brought up to ask. What is the moon? It’s a rock in earth’s orbit. Why is it up there? Well—that’s sort of a nonsense question. There really isn’t a why. Forget why. Kids do wonder why though. We would rather tell them what. The beauty of childhood is that, for a period of time at least, we believe there is a why. Think about it… What was so great about being a kid, in some respects, was feeling the intent of things, the why. Whether consciously or not, we felt that everything that came our way was blessed with some purpose, even if that purpose was something we didn’t especially like. I’ve got kind of a fuzzy example-- My son, Caleb, loves to eat a good bowl of sugar frosted cereal in the morning. He does it the same way I used to do it, eating while staring at the box in front of him. Every now and then he’ll flip it over to see a different side. The characters (usually cartoons) are all smiles, dancing and running around just for his amusement. They have bowls of cereal too! That’s what makes eating all the more fun. It’s almost communal. We’re all eating Choco-bombs cereal-- me and my cartoon pals! Of course this is every American boy’s God given right… it’s their version of a cold beer and the evening paper. I remember doing that. I loved doing that. But I remember what killed it for me too.

It was the day I realized that this whole cartoon character cereal thing was not just a loving effort on somebody’s part to give me happiness at the breakfast table. It was about something else entirely. It was about manipulation to make me watch some show, or buy some toy, or bug my parents about getting enough proof of purchase seals so I could trade them in for some cheap-ass thing in the mail. In short, it was about making somebody a little cash at my expense. Behind all of those sunny smiles was a sales pitch. I’m not exactly sure when I realized this or what the turning point was. Maybe the cereal guys were pushing a new product on the back of the box just a little too hard and I started to get suspicious. Maybe it was when I realized that I had to eat twenty boxes of this stuff in order to receive the tiniest of prizes sixty days later in the mail. It didn’t take long for the illusion to crumble. And now that we’ve all grown up we see such manipulative acts in the world as a given. Of course the cereal guys were insincere! I should have seen it coming! What did I expect? Well… I’m not sure what I expected back then, but without a doubt I did expect something else. We all did. None of us came out of the womb so wise.

Caleb doesn’t see this yet and, to be honest, I hope he doesn’t for a long time. He’s still got cartoon buddies at the breakfast table who make him laugh so milk comes out of his nose. That’s a good thing and I want it to last. One day, though, he’ll catch it. He’ll see somebody on the other end of that cartoon yanking his chain. What was lost for me though was the idea that there was good stuff out there in the world. Not just cereal, but trees, and bugs, and TV shows, and stray cats, and uncles, and grandpas. And they weren’t just arbitrarily there either… they were intentionally there-- on purpose, with me in mind.

That’s quite a leap to take, I know, and the purpose of this essay is not to weigh the truth or untruth of such an idea. My only purpose at present is to show that this was what we all expected out of the world at large, rightly or wrongly. We expected meaning, intention, like children running into their grandparents' house at Christmas. We knew the Christmas tree was up for us. The decorations were put there for our delight. We expected it to be so. In short, we expected to be expected. You and I entered the world feeling the same way. Any tree in any field was put there for our delight-- maybe to climb, maybe just to see, but it was their for our amazement, for our amusement. This is how we all thought of the world whether we were conscious of it or not. Our current view of the world came as an amendment. It overwrote what was first there.

When Deity Goes Bad or ("Know God, No Peace") -- Part III

2008-07-29T08:48:00.000-07:00

So you rest on this until one day you feel a chill from the other side, the most enormous cold shoulder in the universe.… Maybe He’s had enough of you. Maybe He’s tired of the arrangement. Maybe there never was a “He” there to begin with and all you ever did was fall in love with thin air…

This feeling usually comes upon you when, through the progression of certain events, you begin to feel as if God has done something unjust in the world or when you believe He is withholding a very needed good from your life. You need some one to be healed and they’re not. You need a job and you don’t get one. You need a husband or a wife, a companion to walk with in this scary world, and all God gives you is the companion of loneliness, a shadow that lurks and grins at you every night when you climb into bed alone. You begin to feel that the material universe is all that there is, and all happiness or sadness comes randomly without any mind or purpose behind it. Or worse still, that there is a mind or purpose behind it, and it’s a purpose that doesn’t think fondly of you. Your needs are only wants and if you were a less selfish person you wouldn’t label a want as a need. See…? You don’t really need to be happy. You don’t really need anything that you don’t already have. You begin to parse through your needs and your wants and trim the thing down to the bare necessities of bread and water and breath.

Preachers and Scripture tell us that this is for our own good, that God is “forming Christ in us” through various “trials and tribulations.” I don’t doubt that this is all very true and often times there are lessons to be learned from the vacancies in our lives. So as Christians we buck up and try to be a “team player” with God, to take our medicine like good little children and keep our ears open to whatever lessons He might be trying to teach us. But days pass into months and months into years and eventually you begin to wonder if, somewhere along the line, you missed something. It’s like suddenly realizing you missed your exit on the interstate and there’s not another one for miles. You keep plowing forward because it’s the only option you have, but the entire time you’re groping around the passenger side, looking for the map, cursing because now it appears you will invest a good amount of your time going in the wrong direction. Is it that you are just too hard headed to get a clear message from God? Are you too emotionally complicated for such a transaction?

I have very close friends who don’t even attempt to read a face or purpose into the mystery of the universe. They are “materialists,” in the true sense of the word, not in being preoccupied with money, but in believing that the material universe is all that there is. The universe is random. Happiness comes or it doesn’t come, but if you’ve got the strength for it, you can make your own happiness in the world. Often times I envy their point of view. They are unvexed in the part of their minds geared toward religion. And they don’t have to find explanations for anything good or evil that happens in the universe. It’s a freedom I’m not accustomed to. Often, with these friends, I feel like a battered and bruised wife, wearing sunglasses to hide black eyes, and long sleeved blouses to cover bruised arms. My friends shake their heads at me, and with compassion in their voices say, “why do you always go back to Him? Don’t you see what it’s doing to you?” But I just smile like a love sick teenager, “if you only knew Him like I do!” I say. I can feel it in their gaze, compassion mingled with a bit of nausea, as I continue mawkishly to defend this dysfunctional relationship.

My friends want me to come over to their side of things, to deny the existence of God or any metaphysical reality, and just accept the material world on its own terms. No doubt, in so many ways, it would be a tremendous relief to finally lay down the mantel of always trying to make sense out of a random universe, of always trying to see a “purpose” in all things. But I just can’t do it. I know what my materialist friends will say, that it’s actually fear that makes me dig my heels in, the fear of the moral and spiritual vacuum that will be left when God is removed from the picture. But that’s honestly not the case. The problem is that I can’t just suddenly not know what I absolutely know, no matter what the complications are. God exists. In a way, you could say that everyone knows that God exists whether they know they know it or not. Every time you pay a bill you acknowledge it. Every time you feel that love is good and hate is not, you acknowledge it. All of human life acknowledges God. We unmake ourselves as human beings when we deny the unseen pressures and persuasions of love and goodness. To reduce love and goodness to mere chemical reactions in the brain is to say that love and goodness don’t exist. “Profundity” is the secret ingredient that makes them so important, not that they might have some corresponding physical reaction in the human machine. We all know there is a God, but we tend to grossly underestimate what we mean when we talk about “knowing God.” He is the infinite…

I saw a church marquee the other day by the highway that, in a typical overextended way, was trying to sell God like a new promotional fast food sandwich. It said, “Know God, Know Peace. No God, No Peace.” Cute, and true to a degree I suppose. But deciding to have a love affair with the infinite might possibly be an experience that, on the outset, gives you anything but peace. You might as well decide to date a thunderstorm or French kiss a tsunami. How about riding the back of a tornado or taking the cosmos out for dinner and a movie? How is it that we assume that getting to know God on a personal level would be anything but a traumatic experience? The finite meets the Infinite and somehow we expect to have an easy time of it? We believe that this personality made the universe, time, space, and the whole mystery of existence. Certainly we should expect to be a tad bewildered at various times in the journey.

He is powerful and unpredictable, terrible and good… He is Howard Hughes meets Jesse James. And I imagine that if a girl ever went out on a date with those guys she would never forget the experience, no matter what poor sap she ended up choosing to marry.

-

When Deity Goes Bad or ("Know God, No Peace") -- Part II

2008-07-18T11:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve been feeling this way about God lately. Lately I’ve felt as if God Himself is wearing a gorilla mask and it’s scaring the shit out of me. I want Him to take it off. I beg and swear for Him to do it but He won’t.

So there we stand, me and God, in the empty aisle of a Target store. I start to feel my world turn inside out as the heavy, rubber, lifeless face stares me down…

Regardless of whether or not this transformation is real or perceived, the altering of God’s face into that of a monster is a frightening thing to behold. It’s the horrible feeling of being played for a sucker on the largest possible terms. You’ve spent years interpreting all your days based upon something that probably was only a delusion. Week after week, hour after hour, it turns out that you assumed way too much. You read too easily into the mystery of the universe. You personalized the universe to the point of preciousness and nausea. But look! It turns out that you were completely wrong. There is no one out there in the cosmos smiling down at you. It was only a mirage, like heat ripples on the highway. And now you start to feel the vacuum replace the person you thought was out there. Your bones suddenly feel hallow. The sense of waste is overwhelming.

What causes this transformation? What makes the face go from friendly to menacing to not there at all…?

If you are a Christian, part of the foundation of your belief is the goodness of God and this is all very easy to believe at various times. You know it on those evenings when you have a moment to yourself and you end up staring into a purple sky for minutes at a time. Above all the roar and posturing of society, there is God, enormous, soundless, and good. We feel as if He’s the strong silent type, reserving His comments for the present, and His silence speaks volumes. Often just zipping your lip can esteem you in a crowd of chatty, opinionated people. Similarly, as the world fights and jabs and poses for pictures, God seems to be content to make another cloud and wait for His predetermined and future moment, whenever that is. He is content to let the world beat its chest. He is completely calm, unvexed, and unflappable.

And we like Him this way. This is one of the many reasons we wanted to be on the “I believe in God” team. His hand is powerful enough to make a universe bloated with burning, swelling stars and gentle enough to make fire flies that vanish and reappear at the edge of a wood. We’ve never perceived anyone so comfortable in his own skin. You could fall in love with a guy like this. You could swoon over Him. You might even raise your hands and cry and risk looking like a nut because the thought of Him is so overwhelming. And the crown jewel of this thought is His unbelievable affection for you. In the Song of Solomon, God is represented as a swooning, swaying giant, fatally smitten by his mortal lover. His Divine face flushes. He clasps two enormous hands to his heart. He goes to colossal lengths to be with his betrothed. He even becomes a man and damns himself in order to build a bridge so we might always be together, ruling and reining like super-cosmic newly weds, with the planets themselves swirling around for a wedding party. Then we’re told that one day the everlasting, doe eyed couple will make their procession, hand in hand, across the milky way galaxy to the applause of angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim. For ages and ages, the moral of this tale will resound in song and verse...

“the immortal has become mortal so that the mortal might become immortal.”

What a picture! No wonder Christianity has captured the imagination of the world as no other religion ever has or ever will. At its core is a love story. All religions teach us to be better people, but only Christianity tells us that God has a crush on us. The rules and regulations of this faith are all peripheral to this one point. “Love your neighbor” is present in all faiths. “Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth” is not. Other religions may share the crunchy surface but they certainly lack the chewy center.

That’s what makes the perceived transformation of God into a monster all the more devastating. Love is certainly the most powerful motivator in the world but it’s also the most fragile. The strong marriage feels the pain of betrayal and adultery more than the weak marriage. Now expectation of failure on the human level has already been accounted for in Christianity. It is “built in” to the Christian machinery, so to speak. Man isn’t strong enough to love God with all of his heart, soul, mind, and strength, but the love of God through Christ is strong enough to overcome even this. “I’ll love enough to keep us both propped up,” God says. This is the great relief of Christian faith. Even our failures, or lack of heart or strength will not bar the way. God is in love with us and even we can’t stop him!

So you rest on this until one day you feel a chill from the other side, the most enormous cold shoulder in the universe.… Maybe He’s had enough of you. Maybe He’s tired of the arrangement. Maybe there never was a “He” there to begin with and all you ever did was fall in love with thin air…

-

When Deity Goes Bad (or "Know God, No Peace") -- Part One

2008-07-12T13:56:00.000-07:00

Reaching back into the twilight of memory, I can recall a day in my early childhood when I walked out of my room and into the small hallway near the center of our house. There was a ray of sunlight coming from somewhere, flecked with bright, microscopic motes of dust that moved slowly as if part of a different universe. Usually from this spot (a half way junction between my world and everyone else’s) I could peer into my parent’s room and see my mother sitting on her thin pink bed spread, folding warm clothes just out of the dryer. But she wasn’t folding clothes today. Today she was brushing her hair.

Her hair was long and black. It was around 1972 and I suppose it must have been all the rage to try and look like Crystal Gale. Mom’s hair wasn’t quite that long, but it was long enough to reach the small of her back. What made me stop in my tracks however, was the fact that she was combing it backward. Her head was slung over her knees and she labored against tangles and snags with all that great mass of black stuff covering her entire face. She must have heard the floor boards creak as I came down the hall because she stood up suddenly and started across the bedroom and toward the door. Her arms stretched forward and she let out something like a playful roar…

I was petrified… In all of my short life I had never felt fear the way I did at that moment.

Now I admit that it’s pretty easy to scare a four or five years old. At that age I often hid my face from TV shows whenever things got a little too tense. I hated being alone or in a dark room for any period of time. But that was all just typical fear. That was just boiler plate, cookie cutter fear, universally felt by millions every day, plain as paper and common as coffee mugs. This fear was something different. At five years old if anything ever scared me in life, whether a large dog in the neighborhood, or a scary face at Halloween, there was always, within running distance, a large pair of legs to dash toward and cling to like “home base.” There were always arms ready to swipe me up. There was always “Mom,” the first thing in life I suppose I ever knew. And here she was-- in the hazy indoor sunlight, suddenly strange and scary. That’s what made it all so unsettling. When she became scary there was no place else to run.

Apparently this is a pretty common occurrence for most kids. My wife tells the funny story of her hairdresser mom shaping her own lathered head into two soapy horns and chasing the kids around. Of course it’s all fun and games for mom, but pretty damn traumatic for the kids! As a parent, I don’t think you see this until immediately after the event, tear streaked faces and that look of utter panic. Once I put on a gorilla mask in a Target store and my five year old son frantically demanded that it come off immediately. For a moment I thought his reaction was pretty funny but then I remembered Mom brushing her hair and thought it was anything but funny.

Think about it for a minute… When you’re five years old your parent is the oldest and truest friend you have, the foundation of all your peace in the universe. You don’t really care if the world is scary as long as you have this person there to guide you. Then suddenly they transform into a monster, a stranger. It’s like getting your legs cut out from under you. It’s like your whole world has turned inside out. You have nothing but your own wits to rely on now and when you’re a child you don’t even know what your wits are. You don’t even know if you can exist without this other person attached to you. A child isn’t born with any sort of “in-tact” self reliance. You learn that when you grow up. And dependence isn’t really something you’ve chosen over independence. Dependence is just a given. It’s your life. You don’t know or care where the food comes from. You don’t even know or care exactly why your parent does what they do for you. It’s just a given and you like it that way. But when that person transforms into something unrecognizable the whole world suddenly becomes unrecognizable. I saw it on my son’s face through the eye holes of that gorilla mask. The world was suddenly and violently wrong. When I took it off, much to his relief, the world was back as it should be.

I’ve been feeling this way about God lately. Lately I’ve felt as if God Himself is wearing a gorilla mask and it’s scaring the shit out of me. I want Him to take it off. I beg and swear for Him to do it but He won’t.

So there we stand, me and God, in the empty aisle of a Target store. I start to feel my world turn inside out as the heavy, rubber, lifeless face stares me down…

-

A Daily Haunting

2007-12-03T06:19:00.000-08:00

I’m a Christian and I have been for some time now.

These days being a Christian can mean a lot of things—I suppose it really depends on what you’re talking about. When I consider all the Christian ideologies that exist out there, political, denominational, and otherwise, I often times wonder if I can be considered a Christian at all. I’m not a Republican. I’m not a guy who frequents Christian book stores or buys Christian music. I’m not very good at proselytizing. I don’t feel very comfortable in the church “sub-culture.” In regard to doctrine I’m as orthodox as Augustine but not because I’ve been convinced by any chain of reasoning, any argument. I don’t even particularly like what I believe, at least not all the time. Sometimes I’m deeply ashamed of it. Often times the world view that Christianity sets up scares the living hell out of me. Devils, angels, Heaven, Hell—these seem to be the stuff of “old wives tales,” hopelessly medieval and superstitious, blind to the hard earned life experiences of different people. It means being locked into your own brand of subjectivity at the expense of every other faith, every other point of view.

Still-- I am one of those guys. I am a Christian. I’m one of those people who believes in a God, a “Divine opinion” we could call him, hovering around out there somewhere, watching all that we do, measuring it somehow. And I believe that long ago the Deity himself became a fetus in the womb of a young girl, a girl who had never known what it meant to lay with a man. He was born and lived a normal life. He was potty trained. He needed his nails clipped. He got stomach aches. He had moles and hair and was a certain height. And yet the entire time he was God too. He was the personality who existed before existence. He was all this wrapped up in a mystery that the Church has since labeled the “Incarnation.” And then he dies-- he makes himself at fault for the world’s evil and has himself damned in our place. God so loved the world that he became a man and damned himself so that the world might not be damned. Pretty great story. Even if I didn’t believe it I would think it was the greatest thing I ever heard. But I do believe it. I’m not sure why I do, but I do.

There are a lot of preachers, teachers, and authors out there who claim to be able to prove that the Christian story is true. They treat it like math. They pretend that it’s all very reasonable and even logical. They treat Christianity as if it were the “normal” way to think. To them an unbeliever is being stubborn in the face of facts. I also believe that the Christian story is fact, but I don’t believe that this fact is so easily come by. “See?” they say. “The empty tomb proves that it’s true!” It does? I can think of several reasons why that tomb would be empty without ever going anywhere near Resurrection. They say, “the fervency of the Apostles testimony proves that it’s true. Those early Christians wouldn’t have let themselves be martyred for a lie!” But people die all the time for all sorts of “untruth,” like the terrorists of September 11th. Being sincere about what you believe never proves anything. It may in fact prove you to be a bigger sucker in the end. Even C.S. Lewis (whom I greatly admire) bullies us into a proof when he says that we are only given three options when considering the story of Christ-- He is either a liar (in regard to his claims of Deity), an insane person, or he is telling the truth. The trick to this argument is that no one wants to be found calling Christ a liar or insane. He must therefore be God in the flesh. But Lewis maddeningly leaves out a forth possibility—that it’s all a legend-- that whoever Jesus actually was got lost over two thousand years of ecclesiastical history and politics. Constantine, Thomas Aquinas, the Reformation-- countless ages of infighting and maneuvering have transformed Jesus, a simple man, into the bloated Deity that we all know today. This kind of thing happens all the time. A simple story becomes an urban legend— George Washington and the cherry tree, the Loch Ness Monster, aliens at Roswell. And we all too often prefer the legend to the real story. This certainly must be true for Christianity as well.

Or is it? It’s odd that, in the midst of all this historical chaos, I find myself swallowing the whole Christian package. And I have-- Paul, along with popes, creeds and confessions, the red blood of the martyrs and the Reformation. I’ve bought it all. Surely I have my reasons, but what could they possibly be?

I do have reasons but they don’t come off clean like evidence presented to a jury. My reasons are convincing (at least to me) and highly personal. This doesn’t make Christianity any less true, but it does make it a bit more of a secret—a mystery. And maybe it’s supposed to be that way. I don’t like to talk about proof when I talk about Christianity. Proofs leave me cold and doubting. If this faith was meant to be proved like an experiment in a laboratory we would have done it a long time ago now. Rather, I like to talk about hauntings...

I’m haunted by things that I see in myself and others that point the way to this Faith. I’m haunted by death. I’m haunted by my inability to be happy. I’m haunted by my inability to be good. I’m haunted by the fact that I can’t dismiss happiness and goodness merely because I can’t attain them. I’m haunted by myself-- a man of thirty-nine years, always grasping and clawing for something that just eludes me-- exhilaration, comfort… I really don’t know what it is. Artists have a term for this-- “the human condition.” All the best poems, novels, and films deal with it. It’s a profound, high brow way of describing something that most often feels like a disease. By the human condition, people usually mean that pestering sensation of consciousness and meaning that we all know. It’s a sense of lack. It’s a thing that mysteriously prods us on to be better than we are. It’s a desire for intimacy that causes us to float from one person to another looking for a connection that never happens. It’s a festering, gnawing hunger for things that are too mysterious to describe. We all feel it though we may lack the vocabulary to describe it. Art’s highest calling is to put the “human condition” into some form. We nod at it the first time we see or hear it. We memorize its verse. We return to its image. It hurts but we keep coming back. There is food there and there is hunger.

Romantic people talk about the “human condition” as if it were fuel, a dissatisfaction designed to push the human race into some new, grand sense of consciousness— racial harmony, world peace. But enough history has been lived and recorded for most people to roll their eyes at such a notion. How many times do we need to see cruelty in the world before we put an end to it? Was the Jewish holocaust enough, or slavery in America, or Rwanda? How long can the middle east remain in turmoil? It seems that change can’t come through social reform or by passing laws—more fingers in the dike. The sad truth is that cruelty is baked in to the human condition and reinvents itself with every new generation. We’ll continue to sing about harmony in the world (usually around Christmas time) and pay homage to fallen heroes of peace, but there’s a sick feeling in all of our stomachs-- a great secret that nobody wants to let out… we’ll never get there. Humanity has never had the stamina for so great a journey as world wide peace. We won’t actually say this to one another for fear that society will give up the fight— things after all could be much worse. We’ve seen worse before. We’re still squinting to see better.

When I was a kid in the early 80’s I was a little out of focus with the rest of popular culture. While my peers were listening to synthesized top 40 music I was just getting into the folk tunes of John Denver. He had a poem that he read at the end of his first album “Poems, Prayers, and Promises” called “The Box.”

Once upon a time in the land of Hushabye
Around about the wondrous days of yore
I came across a sort of box
Bound up with chains and locked with locks
And labeled kindly do not touch, its war
Decree was issued round about
All with a flourish and a shout
And a gaily colored mascot tripping lightly on before
Don’t fiddle with this deadly box or break the chains or pick the locks
And please, don’t ever play about with war
Well, the children understood
Children happen to be good
They were just as good around the time of yore
They didn’t try to pick the locks, or break into that deadly box
They never tried to play about with war.

And the poem goes on, describing the adults breaking into the box and releasing “war” into the peaceful world of Hushabye. As a kid listening to that LP what struck me first was the all out untruth that children would never break into this locked box. I was a kid after all and I knew damn well that I would break into it! I wasn’t sure what was motivating John Denver to say such a thing. Did he have kids? Was he ever a kid himself?

A few years later in seventh grade my teacher had us read “The Lord of the Flies” by William Golding. What was described there was what I knew to be the truth about children, what I knew to be the truth about myself. In the novel, a band of kids are stranded on a island with no adults present. Now according to John Denver’s theory-- this island should have become the perfect example of unbridled innocence flowering into beautiful community-- but actually the opposite happens. The kids become savages-- bullying and even killing each other. They’re haunted and shocked by their own behavior but are somehow unable to stop themselves.

This actually happened to my five year old son Caleb not long ago. He was playing with Ben his neighborhood buddy in the front yard, fighting with a couple of plastic swords. In the past they both were very careful to only hit sword to sword-- but my son was feeling a little cantankerous that day. I was sitting on the back porch when I suddenly heard horrific screaming coming from the yard. Running out, I saw Ben with a blistering red mark on his cheek. Apparently (just for the sheer hell of it) my son smacked him as hard as he could just to see what would happen. Something happened all right-- in fact my son was crying too, even louder than Ben! He was in utter shock, absolutely scared to death of what he had just done. My heart went out to him.

And isn’t this all of us? Are we not still continually shocked at our own behavior? We lust, envy, and hold grudges. We want to stop but it’s just not that easy. And all of this angst can be compounded in more desperate areas of the world. We shake our heads when we see the results on the evening news—dead, naked bodies stacked up like so much merchandise, a five year old without arms because of stepping on a land mine. It’s startling. There is of course a visceral reaction to all of this and I think we see it in that John Denver poem. It’s an idea that’s become a creed to the desperate hopeful in our world. They rock back and forth saying it over and over to themselves like a mantra—“people are basically good, people are basically good.” Certainly this is a statement of faith no less ridiculous than the Apostle’s creed. It’s a religious hope calling us to look past the brutality we actually see, hoping that eventually we will see something else. But is it true?

Are people basically good? Are people basically evil? I actually think that the human condition is more tragic than either of these two options. I think humanity loves good. It must love it. Loving good is what keeps us alive and working and hoping. The tragedy comes in that we can’t have or do what we love. We love good but we can’t do good. We want peace but we can’t make it. It brings to mind all the archaic images of Milton’s Paradise Lost, those chipped and faded frescos-- Adam and Eve being banished from paradise with their faces buried in their hands. They’re suddenly trapped in a strange world, both inwardly and outwardly.

“The Fall of Man”--- this is the diagnosis that Christianity gives human kind and one of the main reasons why I believe. Only Christianity has such a stark, cold, almost clinical view of humanity. Man is fallen. That’s why the world is the way it is. That is why I am the way that I am. It’s a jagged little pill but it feels right going down, like an alcoholic finally admitting he has a problem. This isn’t the world view I want to have. I try hard to believe that it’s not true but the reality of it keeps coming back, over and over again like a stab or an unremitting cancer.

So I find myself a Christian in the world. I believe in the remedy because the diagnosis feels truthful. I don’t like the diagnosis, but it “fits the lock” so to speak. I still have all kinds of questions and problems with Christian faith. I don’t like everything I hear. Still, the hauntings persist and they confirm for me that there is a reason for all of these disjointed feelings I have about myself and the world. Camus and the existentialists had a similar view. They also were haunted by the fact that man knows things he would rather not know, pestering things that can’t be achieved yet also can’t be dismissed.

I'm trying to describe to you those aggravating desires, those urges that harass and push us where we would rather not go. It’s a constant ache that meets us every morning when we rise out of bed. It is a daily haunting...

-

Prayer-- A Strange Conversation

2007-09-21T07:15:00.001-07:00

Hello, all-- Beginning Wednesdays in October I will be teaching a class on the frustrating process of prayer. Are we really talking to somebody when we pray or is it just an imaginary conversation in our heads? Join us at Christ Community Church Wednesdays at 6:30pm.

Hope to see you there!

Kirb

(Click on the image to make it bigger)

Prayer

2007-09-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

Will you?
Will you reach into the machine?
Will you grab the wheels and make them stop?
Will you bend all that is natural
And create the unnatural, the supernatural?

Will you?
Will you stop what you’re doing when you hear the Name?
Leaving the sun to burn, the moon to grow cold.
To, at long last, stoop down and reshape this place—
Taking away your indifferent, cold stare.
Because I ask you to?
Will you?

Little girls stranded in misshapen bodies?
Powerful men with their cars and planes and wills?
The turning key?
The opening door?
The landscape suddenly lifted, pulled up and set in a new place,
only because I feel it should be, because I ask you to
Will you?

Or will I?
Be left to make up reasons
Reasons you sat still, stayed your hand
Reasons you saw best not to
Rescue me.
To speak to me.

The Beautiful Panic of Death

2007-07-23T11:31:00.000-07:00

"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Boswell: Life 1777.

One winter night a few years back, my wife and I were driving through Texas, heading home after visiting family in Tennessee. It was getting late and the roads were slick, covered in sporadic patches of “black ice.” I was the only one awake. In the back, I could hear the kids snoring softly in their car seats. My wife had also given up the ghost, her head now resting in her seat belt like a hammock. The roads were dangerous but I was being very careful. I had both hands on the wheel, a straight back, and every nerve in my body poised for the unexpected. Despite all of this, I ran into a patch of ice and immediately lost control of the car. The steering wheel was suddenly a pointless device in my hands. The car had become a wild thing, moving on its own accord. We did a one-eighty on the highway and, much to my horror, ended up facing traffic. But, amazingly, there wasn’t any traffic. Sure, I could see the lights of a semi-truck headed our way but it was still very far off. I had plenty of time to turn the car around and start us back in the right direction. My wife woke up immediately, scared to death. Later she told me that the first thought that ran through her head was, “oh crap, this is really going to hurt!” Gladly nothing and nobody was hurt. The kids never even woke up. As we set out again I could still hear them breathing softly in the back of the car. My wife and I talked for a while, wide-eyed and relieved, but soon she went back to sleep, and I was driving again in the quiet like nothing had ever happened. But something nearly happened. Our lives could have been changed forever but instead I took a small sip of Mountain Dew and turned on the radio.

The next few days back in Texas were odd for me… In the past I had seen people unexpectedly die or heard news about such things and noticed that the days that followed were always a flurry of unexpected busyness. Funeral arrangements would have to be made, relatives would come flying in from all parts of the country, there would be hospital sleepovers and casseroles, flowers and suit jackets. And the funeral would come very quickly too—usually two days after the actual incident. Two days earlier you would have never imagined yourself in this place. You had different plans, a different life. But two days after our “almost” incident, my family and I were all together in our little apartment, eating Taco Bell for supper. I couldn’t help but be haunted by all this. I couldn’t help but think about what this day could have been if that semi-truck had been any further down the interstate. Today would have been funeral day. It would have been a day for me to re-imagine my life under new and horrible circumstances. Whenever you dodge a bullet like this the potentials of everything that could happen cripple you emotionally. Everything suddenly becomes precious-- the kids, my wife. Even the burrito I was eating was precious. It’s good to eat. It’s good just to live and be normal… Anyway, it took several days for me to calm down and settle back into what was customary and quiet about my life—everyone happy and healthy.

I don’t know if it’s normal for a person to mourn over the loss of a feeling, but I’ve sure done it. In the weeks that followed our near mishap on the highway I found myself mourning over the loss of that feeling, that panicked intensity of nearly losing my family and maybe even my own life. There was something beautiful about the “awakeness” of that feeling. Everything was in the sharpest focus. Somehow I knew what was important and my heart was bent towards it like never before. And I knew what was unimportant. I was able to laugh and even sneer at typical everyday bogeys like unemployment, being bored, being sick, or even being aimless in my life or career. Those horrors were emasculated in the clear light of that beautiful panic of death. All I wanted to do was huddle up with my wife and kids. To hell with the world. To hell with my career. To hell with everything that wasn’t ultimately important.

But soon enough I found myself over my head again in the tepid concerns of the immediate. I had a deadline at work. My boss manufactured a scenario that sounded very serious. We have to make the deadline. People are depending on us. By the way, I was an animator on a cartoon show. I had shots that needed to be turned in. It was time to get to work. And little by little, I was dragged back into it—back into the lukewarm pressures of the world and the manufactured panic that postures to be more than what it really is. I got to the office super early the next morning. I suppose I put in a good twelve hour day before finally knocking off and coming home very late that night. The kids had already eaten and were in their pajamas. I was too tired to read to them, so I sat on the couch and watched my wife read. They went to bed. We went to bed. There was a cop show on TV. There was a commercial for high speed internet, the news and then a weary dissolve into sleep...

Welcome back to the real world.

-

Little Lights, Little Worlds

2007-04-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

The older I get the more I seem to be able to feel time move. I can sense its coming now, anticipate it like a wave in the ocean traveling steadily towards me—I can see its shape, imagine its impact, long before it occurs. But this wasn’t always so…

My children are growing up so fast. It’s really amazing to watch. It’s odd to think that I was there at the very beginning of their lives. I saw them-- red and flushed, pushing their way into the world, blinking swollen eyes in the new light. I saw them cry, smile, grow teeth, and gaze curiously at cartoon faces on plastic toys. Then they started to have memory… My first memory seems to be when I was four years old. I was at Nicolas Park in Jacksonville, Illinois, riding one of those iron circus animals with a big spring at the bottom, going back and forth. I can still feel somebody’s hand on my back and the sun bright in my eyes, filtered through tall, naked winter trees. Why I can’t remember anything before this is a mystery to me but it seems to work the same with my kids.

You live so much life before you start to keep memories. There is repetition-- favorite places and things, bad nights and good nights, sickness and health. There are enough days to get bored with and enough repetition to make a predictable person out of you. Leah and Caleb would nurse and look at Mama’s beautiful face, warm with little fingers grasping bigger fingers. They weren’t always these walking, playing, conversing little personalities that they are now. Caleb is five. He can’t remember being three. He can’t remember a house before this one. This of course means that, in a sense, he’s only been alive for two years. I’m sure his subconscious goes back further—his mother and I always there, like two omnipotent gods occupying a universe of so many rooms and a back yard. Two years of reference, two years of knowing your world, of knowing yourself-- not even a grain of sand in the span of time, but it’s enough.

I’m thirty-eight years old-- old enough to be thought of as a grown up but it wasn’t long ago that I made a similar entrance into the world. My brain fused with my surroundings and I started walking around, talking about things as if I knew something. None of us knows anything. Our existence is a wonder. Anyone who has gotten used to his own existence is already dead. So why does our own birth feel mysterious? Why does our own death feel mysterious? Where does the profundity come from? The fact that we wonder at all is the most mysterious thing. In a world full of growing and dying things, man alone is amazed at his process. We’re haunted by our childhood as if it were something strange-- as if no one in the world had ever been young or grown up before us.

Our first memories are usually the ones that haunt us most and they come upon us at unexpected times. Usually when I go to bed at night I have to lay there for about an hour or so before I fall asleep. My wife is blessed with the gift of sleeping pretty much when she decides to. She lays her head on the pillow and in just a few seconds I feel her leg kick a bit. She’s out. That fast. Not so with me. I’ll be on the very edge of sleep, monitoring my progress even at that surreal state, when something suddenly pulls me back into the waking world like a flush of cold water. It’s a memory, but not the kind you think of when you usually think of memory…

For example— one cold, February day when I was ten years old, I was watching television at my grandmother’s house when suddenly I received news that my mother had committed suicide. Right then and there, before I even got off the couch, I knew that this was one of “those moments,” the ones you and others will refer to as “pivotal.” You know it’s important immediately and you can almost hear the reference long before the actual moment has passed. You may not in fact feel much right then. Feeling is not the point. Something awful has happened and you bookmark it in your brain. If you’re going to be haunted by a memory in the middle of the night, a moment like this would certainly qualify as sufficiently haunting. But the memories that pull me from sleep are nothing like this— instead they are random, everyday and remarkably unimportant. Something like this… I’m in the tub. My brother has just gotten out. I have a few moments to myself while he puts on his pajamas in the next room. I’m sliding back and forth in the tub, this huge slippery space, curved to propel me back and forth as the water slaps and surges. My brother puts on a haunted house LP on our little record player in the next room. I can hear the chains rattling and the canned screams. Frankenstein’s feet thumping on the floor. I’m not scared but my stomach tickles a bit. There are shampoo bottles on the side of the tub. The one called “LOVE” has a big ball for a screw top. Orange/brown color. Sleek in a seventies kind of way. You can always tell the decade you’re in by the shampoo bottle design. Mom is somewhere helping my brother. I have a Fisher-Price “Three Men in a Tub” boat bobbing along with me. I see faces in the fake marble tile. Popeye. The Wolf-man…

And suddenly I’m awake-- lying there next to my wife, staring into nowhere in our dark room. How odd that this little scrap of memory should pull me so fast from sleep as if I were Saint John receiving a vision of the Apocalypse. But it wasn’t the Apocalypse—it wasn’t anything close. It was, in fact, a non-event. But the result upon me was devastating, almost bringing me to tears as I lay there in the dark. Why was this happening? Was it just the mechanics of my brain firing randomly, like a glitch in my computer? Was the soft tissue in my skull weighed down with too much information? Certainly this must be why old people constantly chatter on about how things used to be—their brains are like hard drives, full and on the brink of crashing. There are simply too many memories to keep up with—houses and yards, faces, errands and hair cuts, countless little meals and conversations all stacked up, one on top of another. Maybe when we’re drifting off to sleep our minds are finally free enough to attempt defragmenting it all. Perhaps certain memories escape randomly, causing us to be transported to a different place and time. While this certainly might explain what happened, it still doesn’t explain my reaction to it. I fear I’m too nostalgic for my own good. It somehow feels irresponsible to put so much emotion into so small a memory. Talking with people I find that either this sort of thing happens to you or it does not. If it doesn’t you couldn’t imagine a more bizarre waste of thought or time. If it does, it feels like the most important stuff in the universe.

Now that I’m a father I watch my kids wade through their own times. They’re too young to be really reflective about the whole thing, but still I watch them. I try to guess which will be their little moments, the ones that will haunt them in adult years. Every morning my daughter Leah feeds a couple of stray cats that hang out by our back door. She communes with them daily before getting out of her pajamas and starting school. Caleb is always making castles out of our couch cushions. He nuzzles inside the cozy walls with a comic book and a couple of plastic pirates. Maybe when my kids are older, after they’ve gotten married and gotten jobs, they’ll wake up in the middle of the night thinking about these things. More than likely they’ll dismiss it as nostalgia, or blame it on middle age and melancholy. But maybe they’ll puzzle over it as I have-- maybe they’ll wonder why such a mundane moment could feel so haunted, so holy.

Perhaps these moments haunt us because of how uncomplicated they are—couch cushion castles, cats waiting for you at the back door, sliding back and forth in a draining tub… If there’s ever a time in our lives when we are completely happy, it is during these times. Maybe it’s the bliss of self forgetfulness that we love-- the joy of coming out of yourself. This is happiness before you felt what you were and wanted to make changes. It’s the joy (maybe only lasting a split second) of feeling no lack in yourself or in the world. We work hard for moments like these and perhaps they come every once in blue moon, like fragments from a ship wreck washing onto the shore-- flotsam and jetsam. We pick them up, grateful for the discovery but sad for what they remind us of – that we’re castaways. They pacify us and they awake urges that make the rest of our lives seem unsatisfying. They make us happy and sad. We are eased by their coming and haunted by their coming-- they remind us of what joy is and what the lack of joy is. Most of all, they aggravate the part of us that wants desperately to be happy, a thing we’re not sure even exists in our world.

In G.K. Chesterton’s short story, Manalive, an overweight middle aged man, appropriately named Innocent Smith, takes a few reluctant disciples with him up to the roof of their apartment to drink a bottle of mediocre Bordeaux. What they discover is that even a bad wine tastes somewhat magical when consumed in an unusual setting. One particularly jaded young man can’t help but notice the difference. He speculates that his cheap cigarettes might taste better on a couple of stilts or even from the top of a tree! I’ve had a similar experience. Once, during a summer I spent on my grandmother’s farm, I enjoyed a bowl of canned peaches inside a makeshift tent my cousins and I created out of sheets we hung out on the line. I still remember the wind whipping those bright panels and the muted sunlight, the taste of those peaches and drinking the heavy syrup from my bowl. I remember how my cousins and I found each other unusually funny that afternoon-- stupid knock, knock jokes and silly faces. Our improvised surroundings enchanted everything and, for an hour or two that summer day, we found ourselves in fairyland. It’s a strange magic indeed that can make a cheap slice of Del Monte peach taste like the fruit of paradise. Even the pleasure of our own company was transformed into something beyond the ordinary. We were witty-- the words came out like cream! And we were abnormally generous to each other, letting each be funny in their turn and doing our part to laugh along. Every comment or joke made in that tent received ten times more laughs than they deserved. Ultimately this is why people go on picnics. It’s not just to be outdoors-- it’s to make your friends more agreeable and your food taste better. Potato chips and Dr. Pepper always taste better outside.

Recapturing the romance of being alive is what this is really all about-- doing an old thing in a different way. This has become like a religion for some people Whatever it takes to wake us out of our coma, that’s what we’ll do—even if it means skinny dipping, jumping out of an airplane, or smoking cigarettes on stilts. We want to feel alive in the moment, not forever pining over the past or the future. We want to recapture what we experienced best in childhood—the all encompassing “now” of things. But this can escalate to ridiculous proportions. An office worker on his break simply can’t drag out the stilts every time he goes for a smoke. It’s impossible to continually think up new ways to shock ourselves into “living for the moment.” Eventually you’ll run out of ideas or become so warped in your methods that you end up leaving the realm of sanity. Sex has perverted itself in this way. At the end of the day, sex is no more complicated than fitting tab A into slot B, but it’s the euphoria that we want-- and that, at best, is intangible.

We taste things early in our lives that leave us wanting, longing for those flashes of joy that made all other life look pale and sickly. We remember running across green lawns at dusk with fire flies miraculously appearing in glory and fading just as fast. Quiet times on porches, watching rain fall. Alone times with toys, silent games, and stories in your head. Christmas before you knew what Christmas was—little lights, little worlds. Books with illustrations that were suddenly waiting for you at the turn of a page. Pencil and paper and faces you drew, the quiet joy of making something just to make it, not knowing or caring when you’d be done with it or what it was for. We want to do it all again but we can’t reverse engineer these moments. Setting up all the particulars and technically doing the same things again won’t bring about the same joy. There are few things more pathetic than trying to engineer your own meaningful moment. And this is another disconnect, another tragedy of the Fall. There is a life we feel we ought to have but somehow can’t have. And we can’t just dismiss our appetite for it, see it as unrealistic and go onto other things. The hunger pangs won’t let us. In a way, wanting for this happiness is all that we ever do. We have always and only wanted those simple moments to last forever, but it can’t be done and we spend the rest of our lives mourning this fact. Motivational speakers constantly dangle the carrot of self fulfillment in front of our noses but all they’ve done is discover that money can be made from such longings, like a mortician suddenly discovering death. No matter what any author, guru, preacher, or daytime television host might tell us, the joy that eludes us will continue to elude us just as it did Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoevsky, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen or anybody else who has ever lived a thoughtful moment on the earth.

The gap tells us something. It speaks of a time when there was no gap. We are like men without legs who dream of stems that could carry us along. We are hungry in a world where food doesn’t exist, so we redefine hunger to mean something else. The urges of consciousness are pulling and prodding us toward a horrible and embarrassing fact-- a tragic event in our history that won’t go away no matter how flippant, glib, or jaded we become. It is, in fact, our sorry obligation in this world to ache and to bleed and yearn-- to know the contrast of what was meant to be and what, unfortunately, is…

Flotsam and jetsam-- pieces and shreds of paradise continue to wash upon the shore. And every morning we’ll rise and wander the beach of our days, hoping for the elation of another discovery, another piece of what was somehow lost long ago.

Jesus and Job-- Part Six

2007-03-05T06:31:00.000-08:00

But there are a few obscure moments in Job’s discourse that I want to go back to-- Hidden in the midst of all of the heat and debate are a few lines Job speaks that really go off the beaten path. I’m sure Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were barely listening. That’s the way it usually is with debates-- “I’ll wait patiently until you’re done talking, giving the appearance that I’m really listening, when all the while I am just waiting for my turn to talk!” It’s a shame if that was the case with Job’s friends because they probably missed what I think was the most important thing he said in all of his ranting. The first thing he does, in the midst of despairing, is make a great wish—

For He is not a man as I am that I may answer Him,
That we may go to court together.
There is no umpire between us,
Who may lay his hand upon us both.
Let Him remove His rod from me,
And let not dread of Him terrify me.
Then I would speak and not fear Him;
But I am not like that in myself. (Job 9:25-35)

“God is not a man as I am,” Job says. If only He were! If only God could become creaturely. If only “He” could become a “he.” If only He could dumb himself down a bit and become one of us so that we could actually sit and talk things out. He’s just too much to take in otherwise! If only there were some conciliator out there, someone to take our licks for us, if indeed we have them coming. Then we wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore! Then, instead of a stranger, God could be a friend, a real companion for us in this strange universe. This is a great wish, but can it be done? God becoming a man? It would sort of be equivalent to a man becoming an ant or a gnat but even that is a weak comparison. And would God actually prefer to damn Himself over damning mankind? That would be like the judge sentencing himself to prison. It’s an odd concept but the desire for this sort of thing was not particular to Job. Many other ancient writers mention similar ideas. Joseph Campbell does an exhaustive study of this in his work “The Power of Myth.” There are endless mythologies out there from every corner of the world, born of the age old fear of death and of the dread of Divine justice. Gilgamesh was no exception--

“To end his bitterness, his fear of death, his life became a quest to find the secret of eternal life which he might carry back to give his friend... He longed to hear the voice of one who still used words as revelations; he yearned to talk to the one who had survived the flood and death itself, the one who knew the secret.”

It’s a desire to close the Gap, to end the disconnect. This ancient wish transcends culture and religion. Christianity was not the first to come up with the idea of a god dying on our behalf and then rising again. There was Tammuz, an ancient Babylonian dying and rising god, Osiris, the Egyptian dismembered and resurrected god, and Horus, the falcon-headed sky god raised in secret by his mother in the papyrus marshes of the delta. There was also the ancient Greek tale “Prometheus Bound.” In this story Zeus banishes Prometheus to eternal punishment for trickery and rebellion against the gods. Hermes pays a visit to Prometheus as he suffers and promises this--

“Look for no ending of this agony until a god will freely suffer for you, will take on your pain, and in your stead descend to where the sun is turned to darkness, the black depths of death.”

It’s quite an idea. It presupposes the existence of God, the disconnect that He has with us, and the extreme measures He’s willing to take to close the Gap. God, who knows no beginning and no end, somehow makes himself vulnerable as we are vulnerable, even to die, even to be damned and punished for the world’s evil. Ancient story after ancient story imagines the same concept. But Job is not a mythological re-telling of this idea. Job is a tale about the wish that it were true. Job says, “if only…” But then he says something else…

Oh that my words were written!
Oh that they were inscribed in a book!
That with an iron stylus and lead
They were engraved in the rock forever!
As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives,
And at the last He will take His stand on the earth.
Even after my skin is destroyed,
Yet from my flesh I shall see God;
Whom I myself shall behold,
And whom my eyes will see and not another. (Job 19:23-27)

Job wishes that his words could be written down and remembered forever. Lucky him—they were. And then he makes an astonishing declaration-- “I know that this man exists! He lives. It’s not just wishful thinking. There is a man like this out there somewhere! My Redeemer lives, and “at the last,” or “in later days,” he will stand on the earth, or “take his stand upon the earth.” Where Job got an idea like this is a mystery to me but he seems pretty confident about it. The man, the umpire, the emissary, the arbitrator, the Redeemer will come in later days and will do his work. The results of his work are staggering as well-- “and even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God.” This is Resurrection before resurrection was an official idea or a creed to be confessed in any church. Job believed it was true. He hoped somebody would write it down. They did write it down and we just read it.

You see where I’m going with all this… Job believed in a Christ-- a God-man who would come and make peace between himself and God Almighty. Job had no name for him. He hadn’t the foggiest notion of a cross, or a tomb, or anything like that. Specifics eluded him but they were unimportant. He believed this scrap of information and we in modern times have the luxury of looking back and seeing a moment in history where, at the very least, we can entertain the possibility that it may have actually happened. And what if it did? What would that do to the way you see the world, the way you see God? Maybe the connection we all long for is attainable. Maybe God doesn’t want to be strange and scary. Maybe he wants to be something else. Maybe the bridge to that something else has already been built and we can cross it. We can take off our shoes and run toward the beauty we have always longed for but never hoped to ever have...

-

Jesus and Job-- Part Five

2007-02-26T09:33:00.000-08:00

Now it is a given that God should be big. It’s even a given that He should be mysterious and a bit scary, sort of like your father seemed to be when you were a kid— an enormous person who could pick you up and sling you around with one hand. What’s not a given, however, is that God should be a stranger, that there should be some cold impersonal distance between the two of you. And most of us feel this much of the time.

Just like Job we look at the world around us and fear that (if indeed there is a God) we might actually not like Him very much. And He might not like us much either. What if we had different opinions about things? What if I thought He was actually wrong about something? Would thinking God was wrong make you His enemy? Would you be like Satan cast out in Milton’s Paradise Lost? How lonely would it be in the world if you found yourself not on the friendliest terms with your own maker? I think most folks are scared of getting chummy with God for reasons like this. It would be like a bad marriage. You’re supposed to be intimate but you feel like you’re growing apart, that you don’t share the same values anymore. What if you read something in the Bible that shocked you, that made you question God’s goodness, like a wife discovering secret love letters in her husbands brief case. But it’s worse than a bad husband. This is your maker we’re talking about here and the idea of “growing apart” from Him feels much more tragic.

But you can’t go on pretending. You can’t be naïve about things anymore. God is just too different. He’s got different loves and different motivations. He is adamant and immovable. He is a stranger. And after a while it’s just easier to create a sense of loyalty to your own camp—the camp of flawed humanity—than to continue pursuing this dysfunctional relationship.

God is alien. Let Him stay that way.

By saying this we have now officially become agnostics. Maybe there is a God, maybe there isn’t. Does it really matter either way? The possibility of there being a God somewhere out there will continue to tickle our minds until the day we die but until then we’ll just have to find comfort somewhere else. And there are groups of people out there waiting to take us in—philosophers and anti-heroes, beat poets and jaded existentialists. It’s all very sexy and cool and there can be real comfort in cool. Let’s light a cigarette and join them. Let’s put on a trench coat and enroll in the ranks of the contented discontent in our world.

But I just can’t do it…. at least not yet.

You go on and join them if you want, don’t wait for me. I still have a few questions I want to ask. I’m still haunted by the possibility (remote as it might seem) of knowing and loving God. Yeah, I know-- maybe I haven’t been slapped around enough yet. Go on if you want to-- or you can stay here. I just want to take a step back from everything—I want to ask a broader question…

Why should God appear so strange to us? Where is the disconnect? Perhaps God seems strange because we are strange. Yes, if you think about it, men and women are very strange creatures, mixed bags of good and evil. We fawn over ideas like world peace but can’t even get along with our own siblings. We sing songs about love changing the world but can barely hold our tongues when somebody cuts us off in traffic. We are a strange and finicky lot, we human beings. And what could be more strange and terrifying for us and for our complex, mixed up world than the actual visitation of Goodness Himself? That’s what God claims to be. He is beautiful, terrifying Goodness, the kind that will break your heart, and make you look for a place to hide.

The problem with mankind is that we love goodness and, at the same time, we hate it. The contrast between it and us is just more than we can bear. We are both the cause of the world’s evil and a victim of it, but we desperately want to be good and beautiful too. We want to share in it, to enter into it like a room or put it on like a large coat. But ignominy and pride keeps us away and, when all is said and done, it’s easier to create an enemy out of Goodness than to love Him. We’re suspicious of Him. We don’t like the fact that He knows more than we do and hides more than we could ever excavate. We spin this in all different directions to make us feel better about ourselves. It’s like a kid complaining to his parents that he “didn’t ask to be born!” I’ve always wanted to hear a parent reply, “it’s a good thing too, because I would have said no.”

Like it or not, we are born into the world and even though we may think it sucks, here we are all the same. And we feel expectations weighing in on us, coming from some mysterious place. We’re supposed to be good but we’re not. We’re supposed to be loving but we’re not. We pull out ideas like “love” and “goodness” whenever they’re convenient for our own purposes or when we’re lonely and needing affection from someone. We are soiled with inconsistency but we want to charge God with the same sin.

But He has something on his side that we don’t-- He is not a creature.

He makes but was never made. He stretches across eons and light years with no beginning and no end. We, at best, have, eighty some odd years under the sun to try and figure things out. This is the vision Job had that finally shut his mouth. There is more to God than a billion brains could contain. What is a paradox to us is a no-brainer for Him. “Even the darkness is light to You.” There is nothing and no one any bigger than the personality that we call God. We, on the other hand, are finite creatures who boast and beat our chests.

And we truly belong to the world that we have made... Think about it-- when all of mankind got together to create a glorious world for itself we ended up making Cleveland and Los Angeles. We made slums and concrete towers. We made the rich richer and the poor poorer. We made Jerry Springer and accident lawyers on TV. We made war because we couldn’t talk to each other. We divorced because he did this or she did that. Our children grow up and resent us. They move away and decide to live fundamentally different lives than we did, only soon they have children of their own who grow up and resent them—world without end. But let’s not be too negative-- mankind was also brilliant enough to invent the office cubicle and middle management. We made the interstate system and MacDonald’s. I’m sure we have no regrets about those. And we’re always talking about each other--“can you believe she did that?” and then go off and do the exact same thing. We love being in authority but we hate having authority over us. We are fussy and suspicious, shrewd and miserly. Yes—God is strange but men and women are stranger. God’s strangeness can be attributed to his enormity. Man has no such excuse. God is strange and deep. Man is strange and shallow.

Job caught a glimpse of this and was stunned stupid. All of his hard fought questions completely dissolved in his hand. Any criticism we have about God can be dealt with by a fuller vision of God. We are the nearsighted ones and there’s always more of God to see. But any criticism God might have of us is not so easily dealt with. He is not nearsighted and knows our entirety in an instant. With us the mystery is not so thick. All of us are exactly and unfortunately just what we appear to be.

And this is where the estrangement comes from. You feel it every day whether you are religious or not. There is a void somewhere, a lack that gnaws at you no matter how good or bad you are. It feels as if God is not on speaking terms with the world. You can question Him all you want-- pray and moan until you sweat drops of blood. All you’ll get is silence-- or, if you’re lucky enough, some feeling of God. This is why religious people always talk about faith— it’s a substitute for real contact, the real eye to eye intimacy we desire with God. Faith, as scripture says, is the “substance of things hoped for” but eventually you’ll want to get what you’ve hoped for. Religious people are always in a constant cycle of convincing themselves-- the world is working contrary to what they believe is real and so they have to refuel their enthusiasm daily like prisoners in a concentration camp. The same is true with yoga or transcendental meditation. You feel stress in the world and do exercises to find your center, but the trick is that you have to keep doing it, day after day. Just like “faith,” all of these methods speak to the Gap, the disconnect that we feel in ourselves and in the world. But let’s say you’re not religious or spiritually minded-- let’s say you go a different route and choose merely to be disillusioned and pissed off at God. If you’ve had enough of His silent treatment and want to give Him the finger you certainly can do that too-- but still, the thought of your own death will haunt you and make you cower on the inside. Mortality puts us all in our place.

You can be religious or not, a pimp or a monk, you can sample from the East or from the West, reach for Nirvana or for some pornography, but the haunting of God’s apparent absence will remain. His stone cold silence continues to chill our anemic world.

Job feels this distance. Even with all his wealth restored and more children to occupy his days, the disconnect still disturbed him. That’s where the book of Job ends and, in my mind, that’s what legitimizes it as a holy book, a flawless book. Job’s story ends where our story ends, with bewilderment and silence. We can hear the universe echo with our nervous coughing. God is not talking-- and all of humanity will continue to feel the lack of Him, even if we don’t believe in Him.

But let's talk now about Jesus...

-

Jesus and Job-- Part Four

2007-02-19T11:42:00.000-08:00

But the debate rages on and on, mind numbing, for chapters and chapters. We have all witnessed conversations like these and worked hard after the fact at avoiding them. The different viewpoints collide like cars at a four way stop. Job is inconsolable but his friends are persistent, desperately trying to “save him” from a fatalistic view of the world. They absolutely cannot conceive of giving in to his point of view, of going over to the dark side. No matter what Job says, the world simply must make sense. It has to. We have nothing if we don’t have that.

Finally, each one of them starts to wear down from the sheer exhaustion of trying to explain themselves over and over again. Let each man be and think as he is. You cannot make him do otherwise. There is one final argument from a hither-to unmentioned character, a young man named Elihu, who adds a certain freshness to his take on things. “And his anger burned against his three friends because they had found no answer, and yet had condemned Job.” (Job 32:3) Elihu is refreshing only to a degree. He perhaps added a bit of moderation to the proceedings but clearly everyone was already spent. We can work hard at being reasonable and moderate—but at the end of the day, there is nothing moderate about the subject of death. It is an extremity invading our world, making all things bizarre and absurd in it’s wake.

The last few chapters are dedicated to God. He finally speaks to Job “out of the whirlwind” but offers him no answers. What would the voice of God be like? There is no soft pallet, or lips, or tongue to form words. Perhaps it is something like booming thunder, somehow articulating language, a dense thunderclap that you feel in the ground, the sky, and all the way into the center of your body. It is a voice beyond all ages, a voice you could easily imagine speaking the whole universe into being…

Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said:
"Who is this that darkens my counsel
with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.
"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone- while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt'?
Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it? (Job 38:1-13).

This is pretty much God’s take on everything. Shut up! What do you know? Who the hell are you to talk to me! And as much as we don’t want this strategy to work, it does work-- God is simply too big to be criticized. The distance between a man and a gnat is nothing compared to the distance between Almighty God and a man. He is nothing like you. He never was. We can talk all day about man being made in the “image of God” but the distance between a photo and a real person is undeniably vast.

Man is photo paper. He is, and has always and only ever been, an image.

God is quite different: uncreated, he is outside of the fishbowl of time, self sufficient, all encompassing, independent of all things and having all things utterly dependant upon himself, and yes—he will run the universe just as he damn well pleases, thank you very much. It’s his to do as he sees fit. And you are his. He does with you what he damn well pleases. You are a gnat, a pawn, a thing made by him. You have no say over any of his business. You are nothing without him. He is everything with or without you. You make no difference at all. He is God. You are a creature made by God, just like any bug, plant, or antelope might be. You should shut your mouth now and get back in line with the rest of creation, to do all of your living and dying under the weight of his beautiful and devastating shadow.

Have we cleared this up yet, Job? Are there any more questions…? Do you have anything left that you want to say…?

Job…?

Utter quiet… The whole world finds itself abnormally still before it’s Maker, like fighting children when a parent suddenly walks in the room. All complaining suddenly feels petty and small. Even your unfortunate life feels petty in the enormous shadow of God Almighty. More quiet follows. And Job finally speaks…

“I am unworthy—how can I reply to you?
I put my hand over my mouth.
I spoke once, but I have no answer—
twice, but I will say no more." (Job 40:4-5)

“I know that you can do all things;
no plan of yours can be thwarted.
You asked, 'Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?'
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.
You said, 'Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you shall answer me.'
My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes." (Job 42:1-6)

And that-- as they say-- is that.

At the end of the day, it was a revelation of scale, not of comfort that caused Job to put his complaint to rest. The images that flashed before him made the point very well. God is God. He is both beautiful and terrible-- beyond comprehension. Fall in love with him at your own risk, for he won’t be had or contained by anyone in any way. He will not be your buddy in the clouds. He’ll continue to do as he does, making the world turn in whatever fashion suits him. Don’t wait for him to keep you in the loop. If there is a “loop” at all, you are light years from it. Spend your days in humility and be silent. God is in heaven and you are on earth and make no mistake—you cannot possibly know him.

After the initial awe of this encounter has subsided, after all the billowing clouds of incense have wafted away and we are left alone again with ourselves and the world around us-- I find myself particularly chilled over the fact that there was nothing in this revelation of God that sounded anything remotely like love. God could have very well made the same speech to all the raccoons in the world, or all the eggplants. He is him. You are you. Stay put and don’t cross him. Job was wise enough to know his place, and despite not having said anything for which God found fault, still he repents in dust and ashes. He bows calmly, respectfully, knowing his betters, and then quietly leaves the room…

And life goes on, for us and for Job…

We are told in the last chapter that God blessed Job even more in his latter years, restoring all of his property and giving him more children than he had before. More children than before… This seems like a strange consolation. I’m sure Job loved his new children but I’m also sure that the loss of his first ones must have haunted him still. Did he still see their faces at night when he lay in bed? Could he hear their voices, their laughter, could he see their eyes darting in that particularly meaningful way when they would share their hearts with him? Getting a new herd to replace your old herd is one thing, but I can’t imagine simply replacing one beloved daughter with another. The scars remained, I’m sure, and how they must have burned…

But Job lived out the rest of his days in peace, so we’re told, and finally died “old and full of years.” And that appears to be the end of the whole tragic mess that is the book of Job-- not a very satisfying read if you’re looking for inspirational moments or quotes that you can turn into greeting cards or coffee mugs. But despite it’s dark tone, Job is actually one of my favorite books in all the scripture. Even with its heartbreaking story and tragic circumstances, the book feels like real life— there is catastrophe and confusion, tears and endless debate among stubborn people about the nature of God, goodness, and the universe. Apparently the Bible hasn’t been given a fair rap. The thing is not just a crusty book of outdated rules and morbid morality. It is an existential holy book. It serves up an authentic slice of life, complete with all the uncertainty that comes with trying to make sense out of a strange world. It’s also a handbook on how to be pissed off at God and not sin. Countless saints did this and have paved the way for us. There is Ecclesiastes and Psalms, Jeremiah and Lamentations. The people who wrote these books were just as confused in the face of God as we are. He is a mystery to us, make no mistake, and he knows it. He also doesn’t seem to mind the inquiry into who and what he is. The rebuke given to Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar seems to be based on the fact that they ceased to inquire at all. God had become a system to them—a big, happy, dimpled philosophy of life that they could sell to the ugly disillusioned in the world like a line of beauty products. God was their fix, their antidote, their “common sense” way of thinking. He was their mascot, their golden boy, their team colors. They weren’t blown away by Him anymore, but you’re not really looking at God if you’re not blown away. Honestly now—wouldn’t you be disappointed if you had a vision of God Almighty and it was anything less than the most beautiful and terrifying thing you ever saw? Wouldn’t you be disappointed if He wasn’t stupefying, if He made complete sense? Remember we’re talking about a vision of God here. God… There is no bigger idea. It really ought to pack a wallop. It really ought to knock the wind out of you. Job was completely floored. His knees were weak in the Presence. When God speaks-- when He puts on a show and lets it all hang out for a moment just so you can get a sense of how big an eternal self sufficient being can actually be, you can at the very least expect to be entertained, frightened, and intellectually and emotionally undone. No doubt about it-- it would be quite a show. But in the midst of all of these breathtaking and unspeakable visions Job found himself mourning over a fact that appeared to be immovable—

God was an absolute stranger.

-

Jesus and Job-- Part Three

2007-02-12T07:34:00.000-08:00

The answer that Job offers is that he has no answer. He has no idea what God is up to. But he won’t let his reasoning emasculate God of sovereign power and he won’t say that what happened to him was “a good thing.” How could it be good? His children are dead. There is no sunny side to this sort of thing. But Job also won’t say that God is evil. It’s this kind of apparent absurdity that drives his friends crazy. They want Job to come out of the world of paradox and into a world of black and white, cause and effect. What they try to do is convince Job that the calamity that overtook him was due to some unconfessed sin. God must be disciplining him. But Job will have none of this either and starts to unreservedly proclaiming his “innocence.”

The issue of Job’s “innocence” can be a tricky thing to try and comprehend. One minute he claims himself to be hopelessly sinful. The next, he straightens his back and proudly announces his innocence. Bildad thinks this is all nonsense. Job is a jaded, despairing man talking out of his ass. He simply needs to repent…

Then Bildad the Shuhite responded,
"How long will you hunt for words?
Show understanding and then we can talk. Why are we regarded as beasts,
As stupid in your eyes?
O you who tear yourself in your anger” (Job 18:1-4)

"How long will you say these things,
And the words of your mouth be a mighty wind? Does God pervert justice?
Or does the Almighty pervert what is right? If your sons sinned against Him,
Then He delivered them into the power of their transgression.
If you would seek God
And implore the compassion of the Almighty, If you are pure and upright,
Surely now He would rouse Himself for you
And restore your righteous estate. (Job 22:2-7)

This is all very neat and pretty but Job won’t have it. He confesses that he is indeed a sinner but cannot believe that all of this horrible stuff happened to him because of one particular slip up. This is much like the apostles who asked Jesus regarding the man born blind, “who sinned, this man or his parents?” Jesus’ answer is cryptic-- “Neither this man nor his parents sinned but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” (John 9:3) It’s an odd reasoning Jesus used. In essence he’s saying “this man was born blind so that I could heal him.” But what is utterly dismissed by Christ is that being born blind is a result of anyone’s particular sin. At another time Christ was asked about eighteen people who died when the Tower of Siloam fell on them. Jesus replies, “do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish."

Sin is a blanket of misfortune that covers all of us, but to hand pick a person, to assign a cause and effect to his hard luck and to say, “this happened to you because you did this” is a grievous evil. We’re not talking about the kind of man who robs a convenience store and has to serve time. The scripture is not shy to speak concerning him—“you reap what you sow.” What we’re talking about is the larger virus that has infected the world, the random quality of disease, death, and accident—the stuff that creeps up on us and takes us out for no apparent reason.

We have no idea why these things happen but we ache to know why. When your child is born with abnormalities you want to know why. You might actually wish that there was some sin that you could repent of—some easy fix. The struggle comes when there is no easy fix. The world is cruel. It seems to always have been that way. Who else would you voice a complaint to but God himself? Cancer, car wrecks, blindness, paralysis, being raped, being murdered, taking a stroll through a field and suddenly stepping on a land mine (you lose both arms and one foot), losing your job, losing your spouse to cancer, being sexually molested by your father at the age of twelve and becoming pregnant because of it, unsolved murders—young women violated and gutted and left in ditches, the countless faces of missing children on milk cartons, a boy named Cole, a girl named Cassandra, somebody’s joy and reason for living suddenly taken away and raped in the back of some dirty car by some dirty man. All of this is random and utterly pointless. Countless millions of mothers, fathers, sons and daughters raise their voices and wail. It is the chilling cry of sudden calamity, the horrifying sound of a mother screaming with her limp child in her arms, ripped away from her for no apparent reason. How deep can sorrow go? How much of it can we take in at any given time? How hard can a man cry, till his eyes are blind and his head throbs with pain?

“Oh that my grief were actually weighed
And laid in the balances together with my calamity!
For then it would be heavier than the sand of the seas;
Therefore my words have been rash.
For the arrows of the Almighty are within me,
Their poison my spirit drinks;” (Job 6:2-4)

And, again, Job challenges his friends…

“Teach me, and I will be silent;
And show me how I have erred.
How painful are honest words!
But what does your argument prove?
Do you intend to reprove my words,
And treat the words of a despairing man like wind?” (Job 6:24-26)

We should never reprove a man grieving over such heavy loss. We should never “treat the words of a despairing man like wind.” It would be wisdom just to shut up and listen to him. Grieving people know something that we don’t. There is a reason they have that shell-shocked expression on their faces like they’ve suddenly learned a horrible secret that wasn’t available to them before. They are the clairvoyant ones among us, they feel the “error in the world.” They know that it’s all a cheat, that the contentment most of us feel in our houses and with all of our bought things is just an illusion. Misery pursues us from a distance waiting for it’s moment to strike. “Man is born to trouble as sure as sparks fly upwards.” (Job 5:7)

Death and calamity are like a wild animal living in your house, by all appearances tame, lying next to the fire, while you eat your snacks and surf the net. But one random day it suddenly attacks you, mauling and killing you in the comfort of your own home. It was always there. It was just waiting for the day to come. Death itself is the crescendo of all human misfortune. We all wait for it and hope to God that somehow our exit will be painless and perhaps even done in unconsciousness. There is no exception for anyone on the planet. In this respect, Job is not an unusual case. He despaired and died. We too someday will despair and die. But it all feels wrong. It feels like injustice. Even death itself feels like robbery. And maybe it is.

Maybe sometime, somewhere in our history we were robbed of something...

-

Jesus and Job-- Part Two

2007-02-05T08:02:00.000-08:00

Disaster has overtaken Job. In the midst of his despair he shouts out to God-- “who the hell is this God who sends calamity to the good and prosperity to the wicked? This is His world! He made it! What the hell was he thinking? Well, I can tell you this much-- whatever evil is and where ever it comes from, ultimately God is responsible!”

Job’s friends just shake their heads. No matter what has happened to Job, this is certainly no way to talk about God is it?

Is it...?

Before we proceed into the back and forth that occurs between Job and his friends, there is one little rule we need to keep in the back of our minds. At the beginning of the book, right after the tragic events take place in Job’s life, we are told the following thing-- “Through all this, Job did not sin nor did he blame God. “(Job 1:22) That’s funny. Sounds to me like he’s blaming God. Maybe this refers to before Job started making his complaints. But this can’t be true either. At the end of the book, God says the following to Eliphaz-- “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends (Bildad and Zophar) because you have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has.”

Not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has…

Job spoke truthfully. In his despair he did not sin against God. Apparently it is no sin to despair, to be confused, or to be angry in the midst of a chaotic world. Really, it would be subhuman not to be despairing, confused or angry! There is an “error in the world” and we all feel it. It’s not a sin to feel it. It is, a sin, rather, to gloss over it, to pretend that it doesn’t exist. It does exist. We should feel it down to our toes. To voice this is not to blaspheme. We are feeling something that is true. It’s real. And God is not threatened by this fact. He wants us to know it, to confess it. In the midst of our confusion we dare not avoid saying the one thing that is say-able! A spade is a spade. Something is wrong. There is an error in the world…

And rightly so, Job brings the error right back to God. He’s not blaming God (which seems like an odd distinction to make) but he’s also not playing around with the idea that somehow God is not sovereign over the universe, sovereign over all things good or evil. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are such zealots for God’s integrity that they want to make this distinction. Bad things happen, true, but God did not make them happen. That can’t be right, Job replies. God is God. You can’t talk about him any other way. Job rebukes his friends for being so zealous to defend God’s cause that they would actually bend reality to win for their client. In other words—don’t tell lies to make God look pretty. He doesn’t need your poor support…

Will you speak wickedly on God's behalf? Will you speak deceitfully for him? Will you show him partiality? Will you argue the case for God? Would it turn out well if he examined you? Could you deceive him as you might deceive men? He would surely rebuke you if you secretly showed (him) partiality. Would not his splendor terrify you? Would not the dread of him fall on you? Your maxims are proverbs of ashes; your defenses are defenses of clay. (Job 13:7-12)

God is not interested in public relations. He’s not a politician who needs the support of his people in order to win. Like it or not, God does what he damn well pleases in the universe and doesn’t need any spin doctors to clean up after him. Apparently God would rather lose his side in a debate than to have anyone gloss over his more prickly character traits. To know God is to be bewildered. Anyone who has God wrapped up, all nice and pretty, doesn’t know God.

But some people think otherwise. Some people loudly proclaim that God cannot be “the author of confusion.” He would not send such mixed signals to man. Some have argued that all of Job’s fears would have been eased if he had simply been privy to the conversation God had with Satan at the beginning of the story. If he had heard Satan’s challenge all would have been made clear. But I don’t think so. I think this challenge only thickens the mystery. Why should God accept such a challenge? Surely he knew beforehand that Job would pass this test. Why even do the test to begin with? Well... maybe Job needed to learn a lesson—maybe he was prideful in his righteousness or something like that. But the debate over Job was over his blamelessness. God himself admitted that there was “no cause” in harming Job, that he “still holds fast to his integrity.” (Job 2:3). There is no lesson for Job here. None at all. God simply took Satan up on his challenge. He could have laughed Satan out of his presence but he didn’t. He could have spared Job all this heartache but he didn’t. The mystery hasn’t been moved one inch. God’s motivations are still unknown.

Several years ago when I was involved in youth ministry, one of the kids I worked with died tragically in a car wreck not far from the church. He left our Bible study that Wednesday night, got in his car and slammed into a tree not even a mile away. His mother and father were staples in the church, salt of the earth kind of people. It was hard to see them try to make sense out of suddenly losing their son. They were still in shock when the funeral came around. Many ministers in the community came by to offer prayers and comfort. It’s hard to be a minister and to try to offer “reasons” for disasters like these. I suppose love can make us say some pretty nonsensical things. I’m sure I said some ridiculous stuff at the time. A few weeks after the funeral I tried to sort out all of the random words of comfort that we haphazardly blundered out. One thing I heard was “God didn’t cause this car wreck. God doesn’t do car wrecks. That’s not his business.” Okay-- There may be some truth to this as seen in the first chapter of Job. Satan put God up to it. But certainly this makes God out to be a pretty naïve and impressionable guy—traits you don’t especially want to see in an all powerful being. Certainly we can say God allowed it which is the same as saying God did it himself. Anyone in management knows this is true. If you approve something to be done, like it or not, you own it. You could have said no. God could have said no to the disasters that happened to Job. He could have said no to this kid’s car wreck. But he didn’t say no. He actually said yes. There’s not a lot of wiggle room here. God owns it.

Job said as much and Eliphaz couldn’t stand it. “Are the consolations of God too small for you,” he says, “even the word spoken gently with you? Why does your heart carry you away? And why do your eyes flash, that you should turn your spirit against God and allow such words to go out of your mouth?” (Job 15:11-13). Job’s answer is very matter of fact--

It is God who removes the mountains, they know not how,
When He overturns them in His anger;
Who shakes the earth out of its place,
And its pillars tremble;
Who commands the sun not to shine,
And sets a seal upon the stars;
Who alone stretches out the heavens
And tramples down the waves of the sea;
Who makes the Bear, Orion and the Pleiades,
And the chambers of the south;
Who does great things, unfathomable,
And wondrous works without number.
Were He to pass by me, I would not see Him;
Were He to move past me, I would not perceive Him.
Were He to snatch away, who could restrain Him?
Who could say to Him, 'What are You doing?'
If it is a matter of power, behold, He is the strong one!
And if it is a matter of justice, who can summon Him?
Though I am righteous, my mouth will condemn me;
Though I am guiltless, He will declare me guilty.
I am guiltless; I do not take notice of myself;
I despise my life. It is all one; therefore I say,
'He destroys the guiltless and the wicked.'
If the scourge kills suddenly,
He mocks the despair of the innocent.
The earth is given into the hand of the wicked;
He covers the faces of its judges.
If it is not He, then who is it? (Job 9:5-24)

Very good question—if it is not God who causes these things, then who is it? Who’s running the show? It must be God. At the end of the day, it was God who killed Job’s sons and daughters. It was God who caused the car wreck. I can just see the mouths of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar hanging open. My mouth hangs open too. This is bordering on blasphemous, but remember-- in all this Job did not sin with his lips nor did he blame God.

There was another word of comfort offered to the parents of this kid who died. It’s a bit of reasoning that comes with the Christian desire always to “connect the dots,” to say that “all things work for good for those who are in Christ Jesus.” What was said was—“I know why God allowed this to happen—so that you (dad) could, in turn, comfort others who have gone through a similar experience, others who have lost their children in an untimely way. God has created a new ministry for you!” This sounded good at the time but after a while I started to see some holes in the theory. Let’s say one day I get up in the morning and, for no apparent reason, slap the living snot out of my six year old son at the breakfast table. He might turn to me in tears and confusion and ask why I would do such a thing. My answer would be—“so you, in turn, can comfort the other little kids that I plan on slapping today.” Do you see what I mean? It’s a circular argument. There is no answer here for why God allowed a tragic thing to happen. My son might be able to offer comfort to other kids but he can’t offer a reason. “He slapped me too,” he might say. “It hurt didn’t it? Sorry about that. I know how it feels.” This is a valid thing and I have no doubt that this father in our church ended up offering loads of comfort to other grieving families. But the mystery of God’s purposes remains.

I guess we shouldn’t be too quick to “connect the dots” when it comes to offering a reason why God has done anything. I don’t doubt that the verse that says “all things work for the good” is true, I’m just not sure that I have enough vision to tell what that good actually is...

-

Jesus and Job-- Part One

2007-01-30T07:27:00.000-08:00

“Once upon a time, in the land of Uz, there was a man named Job who turned out to be the most unfortunate sucker to walk the planet.” This might be one way of re-telling what is perhaps the saddest and most disturbing story found in the Bible. Boiled down to it’s essence, the story of Job is about a guy who gets royally screwed by a cycle of seemingly unrelated tragedies in his life. In the midst of his sorrow, Job suddenly finds himself surrounded by a group of “life coaches,” guys who are convinced they know what Job’s problem is and how it can easily be fixed. There is nothing more frustrating than watching the complexities of your life get whittled down into little self-help bullet points by some preacher or motivational speaker. In this respect, Job can be a very exasperating book to read. It starts out with a sad string of events, continues into countless debates (where no one is really listening to anyone else) and finally leaves you in a state of mental weariness. It’s an arguing book. It’s a book of talking and debating—words going out to do battle with other words. The cumulative effect is demoralizing and at the end of all the chatter you almost don’t care anymore. The subject has gotten old. There seem to be no points of agreement. Even God himself makes a special appearance at the end of the story but provides no punch line or heart warming antidote to wrap things up. I suppose the book of Job would not make a very good Hallmark inspirational movie of the week. That’s the Bible for you…

Origins for the book of Job are hard to come by. Some believe it to be the oldest book found in the Bible, older even than Genesis and the Torah. Some believe that Job lived prior to Abraham and clock him in as one of the descendants of Shem, son of Noah-- “and Ophir and Havilah and Jobab; all of these were the sons of Joktan” (Gen 10:29). This places the book of Job, along with the Epic of Gilgamesh, as one of the oldest written stories on earth. It was conceived at a very mysterious time in pre-history-- nobody really knows what the world was like back then. What I find fascinating is that, despite thousands (if not millions) of years of history, human kind has remained essentially unchanged since these stories were recorded. We are haunted by the exact same things as they were: life, death, immortality… All of our computers, technology, and sophistication can’t untie the age old knots twisting in our stomachs. We all are Job and Gilgamesh. We essentially are the same groping, confused people. Apparently traveling to the moon hasn’t done us all that much good. We too, with Gilgamesh, might be found crying out--

'How can I be silent,how can I rest,
when Enkidu whom I love is dust,
and I too shall die and be laid in the earth for ever.'

The ancients were not as unsophisticated as we would like to think. They weren’t sitting around waiting for someone to invent the internet. They probed deep into the enormous puzzle of the universe and didn’t have prime time TV to divert their attention every half hour. We are the lightweights in the span of history. We are the ones drunk on the brew of popular culture, unable or unwilling to think about our own lives and our own mortality. Job gives us the opportunity to do this and (lucky for us) to do it as spectators. We can watch him suffer without necessarily doing it ourselves. We can drive by his catastrophe, like a car wreck on the highway, and breathe a prayer of thanks that it wasn’t us. In a way, we can learn his lesson without actually living it.

So what can we be taught from this wreck of a man, sitting in ashes with torn clothes and dogs licking his sores? There is little comfort to be found in the book of Job but there is plenty to disturb and to make you wonder. At the beginning of the book Satan appears to God and makes a challenge-- "Does Job obey God for nothing? Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.” (Job 1:9-11) God agrees to this challenge (who knows why) and that’s when the nightmare begins…

I have a friend, a scholar in Hebrew, who has been doing work in Old Testament genre studies. Recently he mentioned to me that it’s possible that the story of Job never actually happened-- that it might only be a Hebrew fairy tale. That’s fine with me. If it’s a fairy tale it’s a good one and confronts the issues of a random universe head on. I actually like the idea that our Bible contains fairy tales-- J.R.R. Tolkien would like it too. He believed that, in most cases, fairy tales and myths were the best outlets for conveying Truth. But one of the reasons my friend gave for thinking that Job was a fairy tale seemed a little funny to me. He said that the calamities that struck Job and the way in which they stack up seemed have almost a comic timing--

One day when Job's sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother's house, a messenger came to Job and said, "The oxen were plowing and the donkeys were grazing nearby, and the Sabeans attacked and carried them off. They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!" While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said, "The fire of God fell from the sky and burned up the sheep and the servants, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!" While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said, "The Chaldeans formed three raiding parties and swept down on your camels and carried them off. They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!" While he was still speaking, yet another messenger came and said, "Your sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother's house, when suddenly a mighty wind swept in from the desert and struck the four corners of the house. It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!" (Job 1:13-18)

See what I mean? Boom, boom, boom. One thing on top of another, with the crescendo being the actual death of all of his children at one time. Losing your property is one thing. Losing all of your children in one fell swoop is quite another. This does seem to be a little put on. It’s not just what happened, but how and when it happened. I suppose Job could blame the Sabeans and the Chaldeans for some of it, but who do you blame for the fire from heaven or the mighty wind sweeping in from the desert? It all feels frighteningly deliberate, even hateful. Just that morning Job had gotten up and prayed for his children’s safety. It’s almost as if God took that prayer and shoved it right up Job’s ass-- There you are Job! How you like them apples?

The timing of each catastrophe is enough to suspend belief. Surely this is the stuff of fairy tales. But is it really all that different in the real world? A man visits New York for the first time in his life. He goes to the World Trade Center and eats breakfast at the very top. Thirty minutes later, not one but two jet airplanes come crashing into the two towers. Your vacation is over. Hope you enjoyed your breakfast. Thanks for your patronage. A reception for a wedding is taking place at a community center. During the festivities the entire second floor caves in, killing half of the wedding party. And it was all caught on video tape and shown on all the news outlets. Don’t worry about losing all of your friends or your parents on your wedding day. You two kids enjoy your new life together! You’re off to a great start.

This stuff happens in the real world and, just like Job, it happens in ways that can make your head spin. Random tragedy is one thing, but this kind of thing doesn’t feel random. It feels deliberate, hateful-- on purpose. It’s a kick in the teeth, a spit in the face. It’s a dare-- you just try and make sense out of your life from here on out! Few people can after such an event. Where the hell is God? Why is this kind of crap allowed to happen? Who’s in charge?! Is God some sort of cosmic sadist out there, driving the universe with one hand on the wheel? Or does he have some point to make from all this? A point…? For the love of Mike-- could he make his point without killing my wife with cancer or giving my kid cerebral palsy? Is it possible--- is it not conceivable that God could make his point without trashing or killing or maiming everything around him?

This is the kind of thing that Job feels and actually says after the events of that day. His friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, come over to comfort him but are shocked at his tone of voice. Job is in utter despair and has nothing else to do but voice his befuddlement and anger-- “What kind of God would cause something like this to happen and then hide like a coward?!” Job’s friends just shake their heads. No matter what has happened to Job, this is certainly no way to talk about God...

Or is it…?

-

Raw Nerve

2007-01-14T19:09:00.000-08:00

What is it about speaking of you,
proclaiming you from that book of yours,
that makes me, after the fact,
an inconsolable man,
a raw nerve?

If speaking is release--
I open my chest like a fresh wound,
to show those nodding heads that I feel it too,
Your absence,
Your presence.

A golden half hour or so for all in those pews
and myself-- to look death square in the face,
even to poke him, to examine him
like you might lift up a dog to check the sex.
It’s a girl.

We run through the meadow of your words
those tiny red flowers of consonants and vowels,
brushing our shins as we go.
You left them here for us to pick and to hold,
to press and memorialize.

We, all of us, take the time to imagine ourselves,
unhindered and clean from every fear and phobia,
young and shameless,
able even to look God in the face
and blush only the blush of love.
Take my hand…

Yes-- there is a face behind this urge!
Can your body take in such a hope?
Can it be true that all aches are signs?
But this joy won’t fit anywhere, in any slot that we might find
ready-made in our world.

And so we close that book.
We say something limp, some word of parting, and go home.

And like it or not, I find it my duty,
for everyone’s sake,
to leave the ache exactly where I picked it up,
to go back to talking of things that don’t concern me in the least.
Work, lunch, what do we need from the store?

We skip on the scrim of the deepest things,
the un-nameable things.
We set a time, on a day, in a week
to make ourselves ill at ease
and nurse this hunger rather than feed it.

A man could go mad longing for you.

You have made life beautiful and a beautiful world.
Even so, come Lord Jesus.

-

Before Sleep

2007-01-14T12:32:00.000-08:00

My wife and children, asleep
10:45 at night.
My eyes sting, dry from reading,
the lamp on the table beside me is a white, steady eye-sore
waiting to be put out of it’s misery.

But I rise, one last time,
throwing the blue and yellow quilt off of my legs.
Heavy, it falls in a triangle, as I swing my bare feet out onto the floor.

And I walk the length of this house one last time,
For no good reason,
To check doors already checked,
To see the landscape of carpet and wood pass below me
a vast and familiar desert trod too many times to count.
The carpet is threadbare for it.

Just one last time-- before I go back and kill the lamp,
this moment that only I see pass, made for no other eyes but mine.
I am alive.
I feel it.
I breathe, I know I breathe,
I walk, I know I walk.
Time is sliding over my brain, and I can feel its edges,
its corners as it passes.

Eternity in these moments-- alive, this is it, don’t miss it.
I take one last grasp before the throb of sleep
takes me and removes this day.

Your eyes are on me,
even now, especially now.

Kill the lamp, go to sleep.

-

Oregon

2006-08-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

Even in summer there is something of autumn about you,
The wet having sunk deep in to bring out a darker green, a thing of north.
And Mount Hood peering out over clouds
I saw on my descent.

It sprang up in me as we finally left Portland,
that tattooed town, drunk on its own sophistication,
it was an hour's drive, maybe two--
and I breathed again, suddenly overtaken with shade, and bark, and layered greens.

And that’s when you feel the mystery of Place,
when your surroundings are so absurd in their beauty, so improbable
that your mind is raped of tedious things.
You are Adam again, fresh with his first tree.

So sad to be inside yourself all day--
your body, that brittle house of thinking
finally let out of it’s element—like a nursing home patient, squinting,
taking careful little steps out into the open-- the Sun

is a sore light clinging and filtered through every veined leaf,
millions upon millions above, countless and stamped, dead and brown below.
And I walk through it all-- stomping and tripping---
two legs pulling along the image of God.

Around Evening

2006-08-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

Around evening
when all loved ones sleep in dim rooms and I
wander this place, this blessed place,
wrapped in the clarity of a worn spirit--

I can see my state,
my favor, and have in those moments
the amazing ability
to be pleased, thankful,
to be aimless,

Contented.

It flows down heavy,
down like cold water to a burning stomach.

Sit!
Don’t sleep, not yet!
Let in this alien, this mood immaculately conceived.
For tomorrow your head will rise, ill and swollen,
unable to speak this language until it comes again--

a smooth, humble entrance, and innocent
like frost on a hot face--

-

What is a Soul?

2006-07-06T06:27:00.000-07:00

Back in 1977 when I was nearly ten years old my mother committed suicide. She had been working up the courage to do this for years, using pills mostly because they seemed less scary than other methods. I suppose if you’re going to voluntarily leave the world you want to make it as easy a trip as possible. Drugs offered an almost etherial journey out of existence. But they never worked very well. When they took effect, she would usually get scared and finally call us from whatever hotel room she had checked into. I guess at the end of the day dying is dying and when you know it’s coming, no matter what method you use, you get scared. After all, you really don’t know what you’re stepping into-- or out of for that matter. There’s no other journey like it in our experience. If you’re going to do something like kill yourself you had better make damn sure you’re ready to go.

She wasn’t ready. After getting her breathy phone call we would rush over to whatever hotel she was in and take her to the hospital to get her stomach pumped. This happened several times. One morning after an incident like this, I found a butcher knife in her overnight bag. I was shocked to see it. You don’t usually find butcher knives in overnight bags. It seemed to me like her last resort, her plan B if the drugs didn’t do the job quick enough. But it wasn’t like her to draw blood. Drugs were the way-- an easy way to black out and never wake up.

But this method was proving to be futile and death had become almost a lust for her. Depression fueled it. She had a chemical imbalance and the medicine they gave her made her face break out. She couldn’t remember what happiness felt like and because of this every happy person in the world seemed alien to her. Is there any real point to living if you’re not happy? She didn’t think so anyway and the drugs weren’t working. Something else had to be done.

It ended up being a gun to the head. It makes sense if you think about it. There’s nothing gradual about it. There’s no time to think. Squeeze the trigger and you’re there-- or not there so to speak. One only has to leap. The fall after the fact is involuntary.

And it worked. She was gone in an instant. My brother and I were not exactly shocked when it happened. We knew it was coming. What bothered us at first was where she did it. It was in the bathroom my brother and I shared in our apartment. We weren’t there, of course. She had arranged a dinner with our grandmother that evening and, after driving us over, cursed under her breath and said that she had forgotten the cake. I remember wondering, “what cake?” but it was too late. She got back in the car, drove off, and never came back. Our bathroom was an odd choice, but after years of thinking it over I suppose there really isn’t a convenient place to take your life. You might as well do it at home among your things. It was in the furthest room inside the apartment, against an outside wall. That makes sense I suppose. That decision had to be one of the last she would ever make.

It wasn’t until the day of the funeral that I realized what a violent act she had done to herself. For reasons I’ll never understand, the decision was made to have an open casket. When I saw the body I was horrified. Apparently, like Humpty Dumpty, the morticians had to put her head back together again piece by piece. A wig and some orange make up-- it didn’t look anything like Mom. Dead people never look like themselves but this was different. She was gone and the body that was hers was gone too. It’s telling that she put the gun to her head instead of any other part of her body. Her brain was the thing that had plagued her for so long. It didn’t work like it should and, unlike other physical ailments, the problem manifested itself in her personality, her mood. At least with cancer you can say, “Look, there’s the tumor! There’s the trouble!” But with a chemical imbalance there’s nothing to point at-- it’s the you that’s wrong with you. After all, what else are we but are brains?

Our brains— It’s odd to think that all we consider to be reality is filtered through this three pound piece of tissue in our skulls. The heart is nothing compared to the brain though we often talk about the heart as if it contained our true selves. You can get an artificial heart and still be you. If you get a new brain you aren’t you any more. If your brain even gets damaged you might not be you anymore. Is there a you at all? Seeing photos of mass graves or of human beings gutted and spread on tables can make you wonder.

We seem to be no more than fleshy machines, tissue animated through a nervous system. A few well placed pokes in the head and whoever you think you are is lost in an instant. So much for the good man and the bad man. It’s all just chemical reactions. A good man can be turned into a bad man with a few strategic pokes. A nervous man can feel at peace with the universe again because of electro-shock therapy. They did this to Jessica Lange in the movie “Francis.” She played Francis Farmer, the famous neurotic actress, and at the end of the movie she gets a needle in her eye to stir up her brain. I was about thirteen years old when I saw this and I remember being profoundly disturbed by it. Francis was well behaved after that poke in the eye. It was the same with Jack Nicholson’s lobotomy in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He was a calmer person but obviously had lost something profound. Or did he? It makes you wonder who the real person is—the disturbed or the undisturbed. Or is the idea of a person just an illusion? Maybe there’s not an us at all, at least not in the way that we usually think about it. Usually when we condense a person down to their real self, their bare essence, we talk about their soul. What is a soul? How is it different than the brain? If a person has a good soul but has an accident that causes damage to the brain is their soul damaged as well? A “bad” man gets a lobotomy and becomes a “good” man. Is his soul good now as well? Is the brain the organ of the soul or is the soul something else entirely? Or is this whole idea of a soul just sentimentality—a way of convincing ourselves that we as human beings are more than just a conglomeration of simple, pulpy stuff? We want to believe that there is another self, a more permanent self somewhere inside of our bodies. We want to believe that our personalities mean something—that they count or last in some way that can’t be explained by the mere function of the human machine.

What is a soul? The very idea of soul seems ridiculous when you look at the basic materials that make up a person. Usually a soul is thought to be a ghostly creature living somewhere inside our bodies, misty but with a human shape. The ancient church has traditionally taught that man is a trinity being made in the imago dei. Man has a body, soul, and spirit. Some have divided it differently—body, mind, and intellect. It doesn’t really matter to me which of these is correct. The prominent question in my mind is whether or not there really is more to our make up than the human machine implies.

I don’t know what Mom believed. All she really wanted was relief from her own thoughts. I’ve wanted to take a vacation from my own head before but never at the expense of ending my life. She was dealing with unimaginable despair. Death was better. It’s hard to argue against that. I guess the real question for her was whether death meant the end of existence period, or the beginning of some life separate from everything else that could logically be called her. She certainly found out, either by entering that next thing—whatever it is-- or by simply not being. Non-being isn’t something I suppose you can actually experience. It’s not like an easy chair or a restful place. There’s no more you even to enjoy the ending of you. I suppose all of us, in some sense, have already experienced non-being—before we were conceived. Our raw material existed in a scattered sort of way, sperm and egg, but there was no consciousness attached to it , no part of us to know us. Thinking back as far as I can on my life I can see where my memory begins to dissolve. I’m suddenly four years old, living in a house. There isn’t anything before this. I can’t recall being a baby and going back even further is impossible. I suppose at that point I have arrived at non-being.

Despite popular Christian preaching to avoid these kinds of issues, the great men of the Bible wrestled with their desires for non-existence and death. Job himself lamented that he did not come into the world as a stillborn infant--

Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb? Why were there knees to receive me and breasts that I might be nursed? Or why was I not hidden in the ground like a stillborn child, like an infant who never saw the light of day? Why is light given to those in misery, and life to the bitter of soul, to those who long for death that does not come, who search for it more than for hidden treasure, who are filled with gladness and rejoice when they reach the grave? Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in? (Job 3)

And then there’s Solomon, “the wisest man to ever live.” He had a morbid debate going on in his mind-- whether it was better to live life and die or to never taste life at all and be stillborn.

And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 4:2-3)

And you know-- non-being isn’t so bad. It isn’t anything actually. Placed side by side with being and particularly with suffering, non-being looks like a nice alternative. That’s what I think Mom was hoping for-- going back to that state of non-thinking, non-experiencing, non-anything. Or maybe she was hoping for heaven. Outside of a way out I really have no idea what she was hoping for.

But non-existence is usually the second best thing we can imagine. Ultimately, what we want is to be happy, whether in this world or in another. We want to believe that we will exist long after our bodies have stopped working. Beyond all hope, we want to believe that there is more to us than the stuff that makes us…

-

Right Man, Wrong Man

2006-06-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

The right man, the wrong man—together they share
The ageless ability to slip and to err.
On that road through some chance they find themselves on
The right man's pretentious-- defensive the wrong.

But humility bleeds to find in them shape
A lowness, a meekness—if only to ape,
The right man, in spirit, to act like he’s not
The wrong man, the freedom to say he is caught.

For tomorrow the right man (though hard to see now)
Is wrong—and so soon, he too shall bow
Before that rule— of which we all are afraid,
That haunting of goodness and wrath that is stayed.

For man is a compromise, with his house all around him.
Till wind blows-- and wall falls-- and rightness confound him
And soon we all (like our fathers of old) come in stumbling
shivering, shattered, and cold…

-

Evil

2006-06-02T14:00:00.000-07:00

A few years back, in a sushi bar, a friend and I were talking about God and came to an interesting crossroads. He had a serious objection to the whole concept of God and really had me stumped by the end of our lunch. It was only last night, laying in bed nearly eight years later, that I finally came up with something to say back. Eight years later… That’s the way things usually work with me. I’m not exactly a quick wit.

My friend had a very common and profound objection to the idea of a good God occupying the universe—the existence of evil. It’s a real stumper. No matter what trick or theory you use to explain the existence of evil—whether Augustine’s negation of the good or C.S. Lewis’ proposition of free will, you still really haven’t solved the problem, you’ve only moved it. Some would call evil a mere misappropriation of the good. Sex is good. Sex at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong person can be bad. Some would call evil a necessary ingredient for the existence of love, a choice the individual has to make freely— or “love isn’t really love if it’s forced upon you.” That kind of thing. So on and so on… The problem with these ideas is that, no matter how clean the theories are, you can always imagine a better way. After all, we’re talking about God here. Couldn’t an all powerful being find some way to avoid these pitfalls? I may not be able to describe how, but I can certainly imagine how God Almighty, the miracle worker, the guy who created the universe from top to bottom, could invent a scenario where freedom and love could co-exist without the possibility of evil being a necessary result.

And there you have it-- Centuries of theological speculation and still the problem has never really been taken off the table, only slid around it. God has to be responsible for evil or he’s not God. That’s the fatal flaw of omniscience. An all knowing and all powerful being simply can’t deny responsibility for the existence of something wrong in the universe. The “buck stops there” so to speak.

The Eastern way is to deny that evil is anything at all. I’ve never been able to swallow that one. A child stepping on a land mine. A dog abused and neglected. Hitler. Rwanda. Genocide. Evil exists and evil is bad. To zone it out is to make yourself not human. It’s a beautiful idea—the wholeness of all things but none of us can really live there. None of us thinks evil is a “beautiful part of the universe” when our hubcaps have been stolen. The problem has always been reconciling evil with the idea of God-- a good God anyway.

But something occurred to me last night… It wasn’t an answer by any stretch of the imagination (I can’t fathom discovering anything overlooked by Nietzsche or Thomas Aquinas) but it was more of an observance…

First there is the Bible. I think we’re so used to hearing people tell us about the Bible (teaching us what it means and creating theology) that we sort of forget the thing itself-- what it says and what it never even tries to say. There are the books like Ecclesiastes and Job. The interesting thing about these books is how they confront the problem of evil head on, set up the basic mystery of things, and then just leave us hanging. Job loses everything that is dear to him and spends the rest of the story asking why. His friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, try to give him easy systematic answers-- “bad stuff happens if you are bad. Good stuff happens if you are good. You must have been bad, Job, otherwise these things would have never happened to you. Repent and all will be well.” Job’s response is basically—“That’s bullshit. I don’t know why these things have happened to me, but I know you guys are wrong.” Then at the end of the book God talks and gives no real answers. He basically tells Job to shut up. Then the book ends. It’s not a very satisfying read.

Ecclesiastes is similar. Solomon ponders the result of living a virtuous life and concludes that, at the end of the day, we all die and go in the dirt. Good and bad alike decay in the ground. He knows there are benefits to seeking God and doing right but he gets stumped specifying exactly what those benefits really are. In the end he basically says-- “Do right and seek God. It’s our duty to try and find him. The world makes no sense. Everything is meaningless. Seek God anyway. I mean-- what else are you going to do? All of life is unfulfilling anyway!” It’s a great book. Tastes like real life. Maybe that’s why preachers shy away from it.

Then there are the Psalms where David bitches to God day and night. “Why do the wicked prosper?” he asks and then screams out to God, “when will you wake up! You act like you’re asleep up there!”

Now the interesting thing about these books is how they seem to call into question God’s character. The mystery of evil is not lost on these authors. In fact it’s driving them crazy. They can’t shut up about it. But here’s the point-- If I were a Deity and I wanted to create a book that promoted the worship of me, I would never even think of including authors like these. They say derogatory things about me. They complain about my being asleep or disinterested. In short, they’re not doing me any favors. But this is the Bible in all of it’s odd glory. Preachers wanting to convert the doubting never read this stuff to their parishioners. I’m sure they’re scared it would have the opposite affect. Simple doubt would snowball into crisis. It’s almost as if God had a different agenda than most preachers in the world. Preachers want to make everything simple and comforting. God seems to want to make people cry, pace the floor, pull their hair out…

And what if he did? What would be the point of that? The point I suppose would be to create befuddlement. To make us wonder. To make us do the equivalent of poking God with a stick just to see what he would do. I like the idea that God wants us to poke him. He’s not threatened by any idea that could possibly come into our heads. He knows it’s a weird world. He doesn’t seem to deny it.

I believe the Bible for this. It’s not like anything else out there. It’s a book of questions and hauntings. It doesn’t read like an insurance pamphlet. It doesn’t do a very good job at promoting it’s CEO. It’s dirty and real. It calls a spade a spade. It comforts and it upsets. It doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you think about things but at the same time-- it does.

Evil is bad and real. The Bible tells us this but doesn’t shirk the mystery of how God can co-exist with evil. Politicians running for office work hard at painting a good picture of themselves for the public. This is astonishingly absent in the Bible. Rather, in the Bible, God seems to know that the view from our end of the world can be downright maddening. Somehow it’s an odd comfort to know that he knows this.

But befuddlement doesn’t equal agnosticism. Quite the opposite I think. The dilemma of man is that he is forced to swallow two facts that seem contradictory to each other-- the existence of God and the existence of real evil. You can deny one or the other for logic’s sake but real life won’t let you stay there long. There are those people who refuse belief in anything because the process seems too tedious. Like activists on a hunger strike, they refuse to submit to any dogma. But no one escapes dogma. Anyone who makes any sense of the universe creates dogma even if their dogma is that there is no sense in the universe. You can’t not play the game. You are in the game whether you want to be or not. Birth makes you a participant.

But man is most offended with God for reasons of scale. Limited knowledge is no trouble for the animal kingdom but it aggravates the living hell out of mankind. Man studies, explores, and conquers his world. We have encountered nothing in the universe that is our intellectual superior. When it all comes down, man likes to know, but he despises being known.

But you can’t talk about God and have it any other way. You can’t emasculate God of mystery and have him still be God. Just because a bug can’t understand the complexities of an automobile doesn’t mean he’s immune from the windshield. When we talk about God it isn’t the same as talking about raccoons or crickets or Frank who works part time at Office Depot. God is a different level, a different being. No beginning. No end. Pure being without cause.

This is what makes us most uncomfortable. If there is a psychological crutch in believing in God there must also be a psychological crutch in not believing. We want to be master over the dog, not be the dog. We don’t want to fawn over a superior, we want to be the superior. And in order to work this out in the real world God must, by all means necessary, become ridiculous.

Worship is acknowledging a greater being for what he is and combining it with love. Nothing could feel more strange for a modern man and yet, at the same time, more natural.

Better To Weep

2006-05-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

Often, too often, I have come to know
The moods that tint each day, to come and to go.
A companion for myself, I am, and never leaving,
Still I like me less joyful and more grieving.
To think that one is more enjoyable sad than not,
A dreary man, unfulfilled with his lot;
That joy is poison to a man’s vision, his ability--
And peace comes best in loss, suffering, fragility.
Me by my side in gaiety and success,
Is nauseating, near sighted, and even less
Able to lay hold of the costly pearl
or to feel the weight of the error in the world.

Imaginary Worlds Part II

2006-03-31T08:21:00.000-08:00

If desire for sex is universal among adults, the desire for imaginary worlds is universal among children. Why? At first glance this seems to be a random sort of thing…

When we come out of the womb the real world is usually enough to keep us occupied for a while, but soon we get a glimpse of imagined worlds, stylized worlds, and we want desperately to crawl into them. These desires have as much weight as anything Gilgamesh or Camus ever wished for. They are the stuff of “sehnsucht” or that unattainable longing that the classic poets were always harping about. At five years old, my son is starting to feel the longing of the poets. Apparently you don’t have to be in the world too long before this creeps up on you.

What exactly is it about imagined worlds that we long for? Caleb with his Disney cartoons, me with my Letter People, C.S. Lewis with his biscuit tin garden. The more you try to explain what it is you see in these things the more it escapes you.

It’s funny-- looking back at the Letter People now, I’m struck with the sloppiness of how these characters were realized. They were crudely drawn (I could do better) and the world they occupied was only half thought out. It doesn’t do anything for me now, but it sure did then. Why? I think part of it has to do with what we brought to the table as children. It can’t be much, especially in regard to experience or philosophy. Kids are blank slates, as it were, and so have fresh eyes, or a certain amount of objectivity when viewing the world. That in itself can be a virtue. A wonderful thing loses it’s luster after repeated viewings. Sometimes it takes a kid to make us realize how good the sun feels or how scary the dark is. But I’m not particularly interested in this aspect of a child’s perspective—the unclouded view. What interests me is what children do bring to the table. They seem to have a certain instinct or affinity for certain kinds of stories. You never have to teach it. It’s there at conception.

Almost always there is a love for animals and more than that—a desire to anthropomorphize animals. This is really unusual if you think about it. What is so ego-centric about human nature that makes it want to take every other living thing in the world and humanize it? Dogs and cats, bears and bugs-- we love to infuse these creatures with consciousness. We love to dress them up and put them in cozy little houses. They go on adventures, fall in love, have moments of self discovery. For some odd reason, we want animals to act out our stories for us. But it’s not limited to animals— trees, fish and even flowers have been humanized, sometimes for no better reason that to tell a joke—“what did the cloud say to the other cloud?”

No doubt by doing this we are, in a sense, bringing the rest of creation up to our level, our status in the universe as conscious beings. We want to give them the blessings as well as the curses that come with consciousness, the knowledge of our own mortality, the weight of moral expectations, and the general dissatisfaction with life. There’s something comforting about seeing the human condition in non-human beings. It makes us feel less alone I suppose. This may account for the general lust modern man feels for exploring space. We have pretty much tapped out all other life on earth and found no suitable companion for the existential journey. Space exploration is the last desperate grasp. The hope is never to find the alien equivalent of a dog or a raccoon. The hope (almost a religious hope) is to find beings more advanced than us or, at the very least, something like us. And we hope they’ll have some Zen-like mojo they can pass on, some new insight that will make the burden of our consciousness easier to bear.

Of course, all of this speaks to the uniqueness of human kind. We really are different than anything else out there-- maybe not better, but certainly different. We have the “knowledge of good and evil,” something dogs and cats and trees don’t have. In that sense, we live in a completely different universe than other living things. And we’re lonely. There is no one to talk to about our experience, no one but ourselves. In the end, we put aliens in space for the exact same reason we put pants on pigs— for companionship, to have someone with us to grope in the dark.

But I’ve gotten off the path-- All of this speaks to the adult subconscious. Children have their own reasons for humanizing animals, and somehow their reasons seem less desperate, rising not from a need to fill an existential vacuum, but from a desire to hold communion. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it seems that the desire to anthropomorphize animals is lessened in children, or at least done with different motivations. Adults often humanize animals for satire—the sly fox, the lazy opossum-- animals are caricatures of human behavior. But a certain worldly wisdom is necessary for satire and is therefore beautifully non-existent in children. Children like to dress animals too, but the reason is never to make commentary. To children, animals are like subjects in a kingdom-- naked and innocent, in need of a shepherd. Animals are to be cared for, dressed, and in that sense, almost converted under the care of their benevolent sovereign. In our world hierarchy is mostly known for its perversions, a ruler lording himself over his subjects. But here we see hierarchy as it was meant to be, the unspotted love of a greater (or more able) being for a lesser.

For good or ill, we are like gods to the animal world. We, are in the deepest way, over them whether our philosophy or opinions allow for it or not. To harm or to bless them is our burden in the universe but we cannot change the hierarchy just because we don’t agree with it conceptually.

What’s interesting to me is how children know their position naturally, how they slide into it with little thought. They are over the animals and they love the animals. It’s a beautiful balance but it wears thin with age. As we grow up we become painfully aware that the world is cruel. Animals can be cruel. This is the real world—survival of the fittest. We’re told this is how everything evolved. But it’s not the world children seem to expect when they make their entrance and this fascinates me to no end…

It’s almost as if we had a memory of a different world, a world “before the Fall” where everything was somehow harmonious. Logic, history, and even science itself seem to refute this idea. They tell us that from the beginning of the world until now-- brutality and cruelty are the stuff of the universe, the secret ingredients that force life to struggle and survive. There simply is no evidence to the contrary—no evidence, that is, except this strange human instinct-- this haunting that plagues us even to the very brink of death of how things “ought to be.”

It is these hauntings that fuel the desire for imaginary worlds. In the natural world we see beauty but it is always in conflict. There is conflict in fairy tales too, but behind it is a magic or a harmony waiting to be restored. The “happy ending” is this restoration and fairy tales always have a happy ending.

The world has fallen under a spell… From our point of view, there is little hope that it can ever be broken. The third act is when the impossible happens and, beyond all hope, we see the restoration of the world we always felt was there.

Imaginary Worlds Part 1

2006-03-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

The other night I was putting my five year old son, Caleb, to bed. I put a hand on his forehead and was praying for him, as I usually do, asking God to keep him safe and to make him wise and good and so forth…

He stared up at the ceiling the whole time, his big brown eyes somehow looking bigger in the near dark. He was in that quiet, thoughtful place that kids get into when the night rituals begin. He listened to me but his thoughts were wandering. When I was done praying he asked me something in his quiet husky voice—

“Daddy, why don’t you ever pray for something I want?”

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Being safe, wise, and good apparently wasn’t exciting enough. “Well—what do you want, buddy?”

“I want scientists to discover a world where cartoons are real.”

“You want scientists to discover this?”

He nodded.

“Why do you want cartoons to be real?”

“So I can play with them.”

“Which ones would you play with?”

“Scamp.” He was talking about a Disney cartoon-- a puppy named Scamp.

“Oh. So what would you do with Scamp?”

He was smiling now—“I would pick him up and kiss him and then we would run around and do stuff all day.” He hugged his pillow and hid his face, a little embarrassed to confess this…

So, not knowing what else to do, I put my hand on his forehead again and prayed that soon scientists would discover a world where cartoons are real and that Caleb and I would finally get to kiss, play, and cavort with our favorite cartoon pals.

When I was done he smiled again-- “Now I’m so anxious, daddy,” and he was. I don’t know if we’ll ever get what we prayed for but it sure didn’t hurt to ask.

It’s funny—but I remember wishing for something like this…

In first grade, I learned my alphabet through a cast of characters known as the “Letter People.” We had films and books and all kinds of stuff that showed us how to combine the Letter People to spell words like-- MAT, SIT, and BAG. The Letter People occupied a swirling, colorful world ( though certainly stylized in a 1970’s kind of way). I secretly and seriously longed to enter that world…

These are childhood desires, but they still deserve to be thought of as serious stuff. Sex is an adult desire, but there was a time when none of us wanted it. We were even repulsed by it. Sex is at least as ridiculous as cartoons.

We weren’t always the people we are now. We didn’t always want the same things. I’ve often thought of belly buttons in regards to this. If you think about it, belly buttons are a strange sort of badge we wear on our skins reminding us of a previous life—life in the uterus. In those days we ate differently, grew differently, even breathed differently! A child and an adult have the same ontological space between them. When we were kids our desires were simple. But now we’re “mature,” and our desires are “mature.” Adults desire the “serious” things out of the world-- things like careers, sex, and technology. The sad thing is that it doesn’t take long before kids have child versions of adult desires. They learn to posture and boast. They learn to look sexy way before they should. It doesn’t take long before all of us are sucked up into “maturity” and we forget what it was that we used to want…

Entering a cartoon world… I had almost forgotten how to want something like this. But Caleb reminded me. He brought back to life something in me that had been asleep for years. The obvious question is why should anyone want to wake up that part of himself again? Why should we want to be childish? My answer takes the form of a confession…

When I was a child most of my peers couldn’t wait to grow up. For them it was a visceral appeal, a constant daydream of driving cars, dating girls, and having their own money. I never wanted my own money. I never wanted to do anything but imagine, draw, and climb trees. My day always ended with a bowl of cereal before going to bed. It still does actually.

Then there was the Christmas of my thirteenth year. That was the first Christmas that I didn’t get any presents that were toys. I actually asked for this-- not because I didn’t want any toys, but because my brother was only a year older than me and had stopped getting them a long time ago. I was self conscious and embarrassed. I was trying to be what every TV show and every peer was telling me I should be. I was trying to want what they told me I should want. When Christmas morning finally came I got my wish. I got a stack of sweaters, a few books, and couple of pairs of pants. I was grown up now. From that point on it seemed my life was a constant stream of pretending. Now I pretend to like the things adults like. I have to do this so I won’t seem silly, irresponsible, or unrealistic. Certainly I’ve changed over the years. Some things are very “adultish” about me, but the basic things haven’t changed a stitch.

People often speak glibly about “finding themselves.” This kind of talk usually has to do with discovering your purpose in life or finding your place in the world. It all seems too utilitarian to me. When I think about who I am—what I have always really wanted out of life—it has little to do with function or usefulness. It has more to do with imagination, joy, and most embarrassingly—play. I am struck often times by the imaginative lives of my children, the pictures they draw, the songs they sing, the stories they make up-- As adults we tend to think of kids as always becoming something. They are potentials. All this play is good as long as it leads somewhere. Adults see a kid draw pictures and they smile wistfully-- “This child may become great artist!” They see them sing or interact with peers and always think of how this will be used one day—used for what exactly? Money? Celebrity? Is all this precious stuff just fuel to keep the world’s bloated system running?

The other day Caleb drew an arm. He was proud of it because it sort of looked like an arm. It was thick where it needed to be and tapered down to a hand that looked like a pillow with several uncounted stubby fingers. It was the best arm he had ever drawn. He showed it to me and we hung it up in my office. That’s the end of that story. There’s nothing more to tell. My son drew an arm and, like God Almighty on the sixth day of creation, he said it was good. His joy came from the simplest place. That place, that motivation for creating things, is often times abandoned after a certain age. But I always was happiest in that place. All of us were. We did things for the sheer joy of it. We were blissfully ignorant of fame, riches, or climbing the ladder. If there was an audience at all for what we did, we were grateful. If there wasn’t, we had ourselves and God to show. “Not a bad public, that, “ Sir Thomas More said in A Man For All Seasons.

This is who we really are after being stripped of our careers and our bloated self images. We’re kids playing in a yard with God watching us. “Look at me!” we scream to him. “Did you see that?” Then we take a nap. Then we get up and do it all again.

Coming back to the point, I see this as my real life, my real self. Being an adult—driving cars, owning property, having money—these things in no way compare in my mind to what I experienced as a child. Childish joy isn’t an illusion waiting to be trumped by the “real world.” Being grown up is the illusion-- death proves that well enough. Reawakening these desires doesn’t mean becoming silly or stupid or even immature. As a kid I knew what stupid was and I knew very well when I was being stupid. But there was a seriousness, even a grave quality to wonder back then. That night in Caleb’s little room, lit only by his night light and the pale moon outside, I was reminded of this. My son had cracked the door a bit so I could see and ache with him.

What he desired was to see imaginary worlds…

End of Part 1-- Part 2 will be published next week.

Memory Before Four

2006-03-17T14:56:00.000-08:00

The older I get the more I seem to be able to feel time move. I can sense its coming now, anticipate it like a wave in the ocean traveling steadily towards me—I can see its shape, imagine its impact, long before it occurs.

My children are growing up so fast. It’s really amazing to watch. It’s odd to think that I was there at the very beginning of their lives. I saw them-- red and flushed, pushing their way into the world, blinking swollen eyes in the new light. I saw them cry, smile, grow teeth, and gaze curiously at cartoon faces on plastic toys.

Then they started to have memory… My first memory seems to be when I was four years old. I was at Nicolas Park in Jacksonville, Illinois, riding one of those iron circus animals with a big spring at the bottom, going back and forth. I can still feel somebody’s hand on my back. Why I can’t remember anything before this is a mystery to me but it seems to be the same with my kids.

You live so much life before you start to keep memories. There is repetition-- favorite places and things, bad nights and good nights, sickness and health. There are enough days to get bored with and enough repetition to make a predictable person out of you. Leah and Caleb would nurse and look at Mama’s beautiful face, warm with little fingers grasping bigger fingers. They weren’t always these walking, playing, conversing little personalities that they are now.

Caleb is five. He can’t remember being three. He can’t remember a house before this one. This of course means that, in a sense, he’s only been alive for two years. I’m sure his subconscious goes back further-- me and his mother always there, like two omnipotent gods occupying a universe of so many rooms and a back yard. Two years of reference, two years of knowing your world, of knowing yourself-- not even a grain of sand in the span of time, but it’s enough.

Seeing this in your children is like looking into a mirror. I’m thirty-seven-- old enough to be thought of as a grown up. It wasn’t long ago that I made a similar entrance into the world. My brain fused with the waking world and I started walking around, talking about things as if I knew something. None of us knows anything. Our existence is a wonder. Anyone who has gotten used to his own existence is already dead.

So why does our own birth feel mysterious? Why does our own death feel mysterious? Where does the profundity come from? The fact that we wonder at all is the most mysterious thing. In a world full of growing and dying things, man alone is amazed at his own process.

Now that I’m a father I watch my kids wade through their own times. They’re too young to really be reflective about the whole thing but Caleb did ask me an interesting question the other day… “Daddy, when two people are talking—how does one know when to be quiet and the other know when to speak?” Great question. I had no answer. I still don’t.

In some ways, however, I feel like this nails the larger question. Our amazement over life feels like conversation. We’re just not sure when it’s our turn to talk.

The whole world and our aging flesh is telling us something important. How do we respond? What could we possibly say in return? Conversation is a two way thing. We are hearing something from somebody. We may not understand what’s being said. The words may be bigger than our vocabulary can handle, but make no mistake-- we are hearing something.

The frightening thing is the pause…

Now it’s your turn to talk.

I Need You

2006-03-15T09:09:00.000-08:00

I need you.

Mighty in the clouds, I need you.
Not just a trick in my head,
but in the waking world—
I need you.

Weary of knowing you
only as stillness and secret.
The voice in my brain-- yours?
My own?

Come out! Come out and spoil the secret.
Fashion cold reality before my eyes, before the world--
to show your heart, your intent toward me.

Be more than the stirring,
the ache, the longing.

I need you.

The Booming of That Thing Again

2006-03-09T06:18:00.000-08:00

It has been said that “death wonderfully concentrates the mind.”

I think the shock and general astonishment over death is pretty typical but I often wonder why this is the case. Death happens all the time. If you think about it, there is really nothing more ordinary in the world than everyday, run-of-the-mill human death. There are elderly people who lay stupidly for years in nursing homes. They eat Jello in rooms that smell like urine and go to sleep every night. Only one morning they don’t wake up—and finally give relief to somebody paying the bill. There are young people wrecking cars, many years ago—in the seventies. Their little crosses on the interstate are gone now. All their friends have grown up, gotten married, are thinking of other things…

People are dying every second of every day. There is really nothing extraordinary about it. It’s like the sun coming up…

And there’s always crying… Some people are scarred forever by the loss of the one they loved, emotional wrecks-- but soon they die too and their grief is forgotten. And before death all of them dreamed… Every dream dreamt by every man is, for him, the center of the universe. In that respect, the universe is destroyed and remade every second of every day. Tombstones are the graffiti of departed souls—“I was here!” they want to say but nobody is listening. A dead person is a novelty for a few moments, even a for a few years, but soon we all have to go back to whatever it was we were doing before— changing light bulbs, cooking, watching shows on television…

Now a lot of this is so absurd that the general reaction is to make comedy of it. We create caricatures like the navel gazing philosopher or the Goth kid or the celibate monk. And we give them a moral—don’t be so obsessed with death that you forget to live. Living is good, I suppose, but we usually do it whether we mean to or not, always filing away any bothersome idea or extremity until the next flash occurs-- the booming of that thing again, always approaching…

So I have a question…

Why is it that, whenever death happens—whenever a parent or friend or spouse or child or anyone close to us dies, we act as if a strange thing just occurred? I’m not talking about the mere shock that death happened today, like an unexpected turn of events, but the shock, the actual disbelief, that death happens at all.

Anyone who has lost someone recently knows what I’m talking about. It’s like the universe has played a trick on you. These people-- these precious ones who we built our lives around, who we laughed with, made love to—they didn’t really exist, at least not in that substantial way that we thought they did. They were a “soft machine”-- machine being the operative word. When that big piece of tissue in your skull stops working, there is no more you.

But we don’t feel like that’s true. Nobody ever has. Every ancient civilization that ever built a pagan monument never has. It can’t be pinned down to any one culture in particular. It’s beyond culture. It’s human-- and at the same time, very odd… It’s as if a fish were overcome with the fact that he lives in water and suddenly thought it mysterious and strange.

We all do this-- death is the alien, death is the virus. Death comes to us but isn’t one of us. We come up with theories and philosophies to explain this away but they never seem to work. Anyone who labors at making peace with his own mortality never asks why there was enmity there to begin with. No matter what fix or state of mind we work ourselves into, no one—not a soul in the world-- naturally wants to die. A man living with great pain for many years may prefer death to continued suffering, but he would always rather have the third option—life without suffering.

Or we could see it this way…

Life is made up chemical reactions. One thing becomes another. The universe is the only constant, always changing form-- first becoming this thing then becoming another. Human life is more complex than animal or plant life and therefore our thinking organ (the brain) is more developed. This means we perceive our own consciousness, maybe even are bothered by it. We want to find reasons outside ourselves for this itch that we can’t scratch. We want to believe there is something profound about our experience. But the profundity is only perceived. It’s not real. This is the problem with overdeveloped brains. They sense way beyond taste and touch-- way more than they have any right to. They sense meaning, but there is no meaning. There is only the universe. Movies love this. Close your eyes! Give into it! Nothing means anything. Enjoy the ride of existence—but don’t think too much about it. You risk becoming a Goth or a philosopher or religious…

Kind of nuts isn’t it? It makes you want to get out of your own head as quick as you can and get back into “real life,” and by that we mean TV and computers, the latest celebrity scandal and comic books.

But the shallowness of this haunts us too. We feel pressure from somewhere to make sense of our lives but don’t have a whole lot of stamina for the journey. It’s easier to let death just continue to interrupt things occasionally than to let it lead us anywhere. And socially we’re scared of where it might take us, and for good reason…

I’ve noticed that the holy-man in any story is never the hero. The hero usually has a “journey” and longings, to be sure, but rarely are they ever for anything more than a general upgrade of what he already knows and has. The pauper wants to be the prince. The boy wants to be the man. But the holy-man in a story is usually a quaint little eccentric, a guy the hero might call padre’ (at least in westerns) or the wise wizard-- conveniently old and never any real competition for the hero at getting laid.

There’s not a lot of tolerance in the world for people who think there may be better things in the universe than getting laid.

A monk in one of G.K. Chesterton’s fairy tales explains himself this way-- “we guard ourselves with walls; and gird ourselves with sackcloth. But our laughter and levity are within. But the new philosophers are girt all around with gaiety, and their despair is in their hearts.”

The “pink elephant” in every room in every place and at every time is death. Most of us spend our lives ignoring it, singing with hands clamped over our ears, and hoping that a complete non-effort on our part in exploring its meaning will do us well in the end. Others reach out to it-- put their hands on it, try to feel its shape.

No one can ever really know anything—or so we’re told. Otherwise we would all be certain about things like God and death and hell and heaven instead of merely hoping for them. But who told us this? Books and teachers, volumes and essays-- people we think took the journey farther than any of us ever could. We trust them but they are strangers on the street, people we never knew…

One Day's Peace

2006-03-07T15:05:00.000-08:00

One day’s peace cannot pass into another.

A day, a night-- an evening of pure delights,
of faces shining, of salty talk
of stinging joy and seeing
all labor and tears,
aches and urges,
a beautiful glimpse of days ahead
stretched out in the same twilight
as memory.

But then the machine belches and grinds
up another notch, up another day.
The same day-- but different.
My swollen head rises and wanders
to the same faces, the same talk
somehow less,
than before.

The world—it’s same expression
cannot draw from me what I tasted
to taste again.

Haunted

2006-02-24T07:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I can feel it.

Sometimes I can feel the moment pass,
the shift and the shape--
the very curve of the earth.
My thoughts and gravity,
like my hand on brick--
the texture.

Sometimes I can hear it.

A voice, or something like it.
old and young—
speaking of goodness
and stray cats,
and every blade of grass, indifferent
and passionate.

A question, making evidence of itself,
silent, secret—
not wanting to be known.
A sweeping fear, staying with me,
until the very brink of death.

When did I start to know?
When did I raise my young head,
And upon seeing this Ghost--
suddenly become old, and melancholy,
and frightened?

Happiness is a Sneeze

2006-02-23T08:29:00.000-08:00

Happiness is like a sneeze. That’s what my friend Walt told me once and I believe him…

I was mowing the lawn the other day, enjoying the contrast I created whenever I made another pass—those clean green stripes, nearly invisible next to each other, but quite a sight scraping the boarder of all that tall, unruly grass. My legs were feeling good too. Every now and then I would need to push up a hill and I could feel my muscles cranking out the power, delighted in their ability to get up there and keep going…

The engine was loud-- not another sound in the world. My hands were chapped, holding down that bar-thing that keeps the motor going, getting the vibrations up my arms, into my shoulders. Another hill—up and over… legs working, arms pushing, sweat rolling down my ribs… It was then that I noticed something…

I was happy.

No kidding-- really happy.

And then-- that quick-- just as soon as I noticed it… it was gone.

Maybe the self awareness killed it. Thinking about happiness isn’t the same thing as being happy I suppose. It’s the self forgetful quality that makes it what it is-- like hot fudge makes a sundae. Now I was only thinking about being happy. The moment itself had passed like a city bus on the street and I was watching it disappear.

Now this may seem silly to a lot of people—my monitoring every thought and mood, making bizarre distinctions between one feeling and another. I’m actually pretty sure that the best people in the world don’t do this-- the salt of the earth. Most of life for these folks comes and goes without a lot of undue introspection. I envy that. I really do. I just can’t do it. A lot of other people I know can’t do it either and I guess that’s why I’m writing this. “We read to know we’re not alone,” a character in the movie Shadowlands says.

Our dog Katie doesn’t live with this burden. She can exist for months at a time going through the same mind numbing routine and not seem to mind one bit. Get up. Poop. Eat. Play with the kids. Sleep. Play with the sock. Get spanked for playing with the sock. Get back in your kennel. Sleep. Get up. Poop. Eat. Sleep. Play with the kids. Sleep. Play with the sock. Get spanked for playing with the sock. Get back in your kennel. Sleep—and so forth. A pretty good life—the best life I suppose. Katie never seems to be bothered by the repetition. She never gets melancholy and wonders if this is “all that there is.”

She’s also not bothered by “should haves” or “ought to-s”. I’ve tried to teach her not to crap on the floor and she does a pretty good job with it. When she messes up I can see a look in her eyes and I know there’s a present for me hidden somewhere in the house-- a soft, brown present that will slowly harden into a monument commemorating the occasion.

But that look in her eyes isn’t shame… It’s something else— She’s trying to avoid a doggie spank and a “no, no, no!” and a “get back in your kennel!” We’ve gone through this routine many times. It’s a little dance that we do.

No—there’s one thing I’m pretty sure Katie doesn’t do throughout this whole process and that is get morally bothered by her own behavior. She doesn’t think, “Jeez, I really shouldn’t have done that to poor Kirby. The guy works hard to keep this place clean and free of fecal matter. I really need to change my attitude! What’s wrong with me? When will I become emotionally mature enough to consider other people’s needs before my own? Do I need a therapist?”

Yeah-- I’m pretty sure she doesn’t do that. That look in her eye is fear of pain and of the “loud voice” and of being locked up in the kennel for half an hour. That’s about it. Rewards work the same way if you think about it-- Sit and stay. Don’t poop here, poop there. Pain for this-- reward for that. But selfishness, maturity, virtue, vice, good, and evil… these things never come into play.

Dogs can be sad, no doubt, but a simple change in environment, conditions, and squeaky toys can pretty much remedy the problem. But humans—humans can get all they want and somehow not be satisfied. There is this missing IT out there somewhere. Who the hell knows what IT is but we have to have it. We can’t just live—we somehow need reasons to live.

I’ve thought about this too-- locusts can come in and clean out a crop, devastate somebody’s harvest and livelihood. Insects can take a beautiful forest and turn it into a rotting wasteland. It happens all the time and we never really blame the insects for being insects. They’re just doing what they do, what comes naturally to them. But when a man or a company or a strip mall comes in and wrecks a beautiful landscape we are compelled to think something has gone wrong. We, at the very least, feel these people should show a little restraint—can’t you just leave a little bit? For beauty’s sake…?

Now we could say that humans, like insects, are only acting according to their nature and we would probably be right. But somehow all of us feel that there are different standards for us. Why? Why in the world would this be so?

The obvious answer is that we are more complicated organisms than locusts and dogs. Sure. I’ll buy that. But that doesn’t really answer the question. Where in the world did the “ought to” come from? We study bears and we talk about what bears do. We study men and we talk about what they “ought” to do. Why don’t we talk about what bears ought to do…? I would love to be in on that conversation. I would have a few ideas. But I digress…

Where does the “ought to” come from? There is not another living thing in the world that is haunted by this strange urge. Dogs aren’t. Bugs aren’t. Even monkeys (who look the most like us) don’t do this. Only we do it and that’s pretty strange. No matter what you believe about anything else, you have to admit-- that is pretty strange.

And so I keep on mowing—another strip of green…

This pass is not as pleasurable as the last one for some strange reason. It’s that damned IT again. The future, the past-- or some other thing that I believe will bring me a little closer to whatever it is that I think I want. And the “ought to-s” that plague my mind. Why did I talk to my wife like that before I came out here? I shouldn’t have my shirt off while I work. It’s not decent at my age.

Meanwhile Katie sleeps just inside-- under a window, in the sun, blissfully free from the knowledge of good and evil…

A Day Between Days

2006-02-21T17:24:00.000-08:00

A day between days
Between milestones I think make my life
Where sun rise and set have no agenda
But to do what they always do.

Thinking and planning fall dead
Among prettier things
Things that grow and die and grow again
Sweet unthinking repetition.

And I go home
Cold house, made warm for evening
Children playing, bathing, sleeping
Seat for sitting, food for eating,
bed for sleeping.

O diseased mind, spirit of madness
Be far from me tonight
The mystery of things is greater than all your labors.

Before It Had a Name

2006-02-21T16:55:00.000-08:00

They say that when Native Americans saw their first horse they called it the “big dog.” They rubbed the sweat of this new and strange animal on their own bodies so they could acquire its magic. Bernal Diaz del Castillo accompanied Cortes in his 1519 incursion into Mexico. He wrote "The natives had never seen horses up to this time and thought the horse and rider were all one animal. "

What would it be like to see the “big dog” for the first time?

The ground thunders… you’re used to that-- but instead of buffalo you are shocked to see a new shape on the horizon! Long flowing hair, a powerful neck, a flash of muscle and color…

And if a man were on it’s back the illusion would be even stranger… an animal with two faces! But wait… Now you see them separate… Still-- it’s no less amazing—a man can take an animal and make it act as better legs for him. A man can fly across the plains now. Your body has never gone that fast before! You blink-- you gulp and gasp—trying to catch your breath as wind blasts in your face.

To domesticate so large an animal, to make him an extension of your own will-- only more powerful, this had to be more than just a good day for an Indian. This would be a paradigm shift. The whole world would suddenly be wild and strange.

When my daughter Leah was about a year old she could say “moon.” We would get out of the car at night and while walking to the front door I would point up to that big white circle glowing in the sky and she would say it—“Moon!” Part of me felt like I had started to drain the thing of wonder by telling her it’s name. Moon. That’s the moon. I wonder what she would have called it?

What did people used to call it? It’s funny because Leah doesn’t have a whole lot of time to be amazed at this thing before a whole world of pre-packaged information comes in and starts educating her about what it really is. It’s the moon. That’s all. We’ve known about that thing for a long time now.

There was a time when a man could stand on the beach and look out at where the sky meets the sea and wonder, “What the hell is over there? If I got on a boat and just kept going—where would I end up?” Now we know—if you go that way you’ll hit Europe. You go that way you end up over there and we’ve been there before. We’ve known about that for a long time too.

There was a time when a man and his one year old daughter could look at the moon and both of them not have a clue what it was they were looking at. Leah, my daughter, is eight now. She’s doing school and she has lots of books that tell her what everything is. That’s fine. That’s what’s supposed to happen I suppose, but it’s also like watching a leak. Something is leaving her.

When we are nostalgic about childhood what exactly is it that we’re nostalgic for? I know it has a lot to do with being carefree, not knowing or caring where the next meal is coming from or how the bills will be paid, but it has to do with a lot of other things too I think. When you’re a baby the whole universe is the nursery and that house. Your toys occupy this universe and that’s why I think kids like toys so much. That Fisher-Price dog with wheels on a string that you drag around. Those pictures of bears having a picnic on your sheets. It must be a lot like buffalo for the Indians, or that cliff that they could sit on and see the whole valley stretched out before them.

Then the universe gets a little bigger. You are old enough to go outside, go across the street. See your friends. Go to their house. See their toys. Still, it’s a pretty small universe and you really have no idea how we get to Taco Bell when we do that. And somewhere along the line, it’s all lost—weather we actually see everything or not.

Leah is learning about Europe. I’ve never been to Europe. Still, I teach her that it’s there and I should. It’s what I’m supposed to do. So much of the world is told to us. It’s packaged in glossy books with maps and explanations. The moon is made of rock. It orbits the earth. The earth orbits the sun. The sun is only one star among zillions. Very rarely do we see the sun for the huge bright terror that it is, that enormous thing that goes up on one side and down another in a blaze of color and strange light.

Part of the wonder of childhood is having no idea what things are or how they work. This delights us and scares us. I used take one of Leah’s stuffed animals and make it pop up from behind the couch only to disappear again. Basic peek-a-boo stuff and she loved it. And from her perspective it was pretty amazing-- “The dog was there a second ago and now… now it’s GONE!” Gone! But look! Now it’s back again! Amazing!”

And it is amazing. When we grow up the universe is still big I suppose but it feels smaller too. There is really no need to go to the moon since someone else has already been there and done that. There are books and documentaries and photos that will tell us all about it. We know how the world works. People figured it out a long time ago.

So we tend to walk around as people knowing everything about everything. The wonder is gone. Our new novelties are the things that we make. Technology. TV shows. The latest cutting edge sound in music. What’s in fashion—how are they wearing boots this spring? Movies-- People used to watch movies and talk about how real they were. Now we live life and talk about how much like the movies it is.

Novelty—we need more and more of it, but how quickly we grow accustomed to wonders—“One day’s miracle is another day’s rut.” King Solomon himself said that “the eye never has enough seeing, nor the ear enough hearing” and then lamented “everything is wearisome, more than one can tell!” It’s the best we can do to try to put “fresh eyes” on an old thing. We go hiking and make an intense effort to breath in the air and to take it all in. It’s funny though—I never enjoyed the outdoors more than when I was a kid, but I never had to work that hard for it. It was effortless in those days-- beautiful. I was just as wild and mysterious in my joy as those trees I would climb or those cats I would chase.

We have so completely exhausted our world that we feel trapped by it—almost claustrophobic, like being stranded in a cheap apartment, without a car to take us someplace else. There certainly must be more to explore—small corners of the earth yet undiscovered, the recesses of the deep. And how about outer space? Now there’s something to think about…

I’ve heard a lot of people put their hope in this final mystery, the mystery of the stars, but I’m not sure what they’re hoping to find out there. What do we think these new novelties will provide that the others could not? So we see new stuff or maybe even new life… Pretty amazing—but I’m not sure how that will change what is basic about human beings. A new enlightenment? Enlightenment to what exactly? The end of the human condition?

Whatever the human condition is, it seems we take it with us wherever we go. A man makes his home on Mars and, after having his token moment of euphoria, sits down again and starts fumbling around for a magazine to read.

The internet was supposed to change our world but I’m not sure how it has— it’s another outlet for our boredom and I can get pretty bored with the internet. In the same way, outer space is just another change of scenery—somewhere else for us to be what we essentially are. On Mars men will still get tired of their women and want to trade up. We’ll sigh and dart our eyes as we always do-- weary of every moment and hungry for the next. World without end…

So what is it that we really want? What is all of this stumbling about for? It seems we have a wonder need and nothing can fill it.

I suppose part of this lack of wonder has to do with the kind of questions we are brought up to ask. What is the moon? It’s a rock in earth’s orbit. Why is it up there? Well—that’s sort of a nonsense question. There really isn’t a "why." Forget "why." Kids do wonder why though. We would rather tell them "what." The beauty of childhood is that, for a period of time at least, we believe there is a "why."

Think about it… What was so great about being a kid, in some respects, was feeling the intent of things, the why. Whether consciously or not, we felt that everything that came our way was blessed with purpose, even if that purpose was something we didn’t especially like.

I’ve got kind of a fuzzy example-- My son, Caleb, loves to eat a good bowl of sugar frosted cereal in the morning. He does it the same way I used to do it, eating while staring at the box in front of him. Every now and then he’ll flip it over to see a different side. The characters (usually cartoons) are all smiles, dancing and running around just for his amusement. They have bowls of cereal too! That’s what makes eating all the more fun. It’s almost communal. We’re all eating Choco-bombs cereal-- me and my cartoon pals!

Of course this is every American boy’s God given right… it’s their version of a cold beer and the evening paper. I remember that. I loved that. But I remember what killed it for me too.

It was the day I realized that this whole cartoon character cereal thing was not just a loving effort on somebody’s part to give me happiness at the breakfast table. It was about sales. It was about corporate targeting. It was about manipulation to make me watch some show, or want some toy, or bug my parents about getting enough proof of purchase seals so I could trade them in for some cheap-ass thing in the mail. In short, it was about making somebody rich. I’ve never been able to get overjoyed about cartoon character cereal again. Behind all of those sunny smiles was somebody trying to make some money. I’m not sure why this was a shock to me, but it was. Caleb doesn’t see this yet and, to be honest, I hope he doesn’t for a long time. He’s still got cartoon buddies at the breakfast table who make him laugh so milk comes out of his nose. That’s a good thing and I want it to last.

What was lost for me though was the idea that there was good stuff out there in the world. Not just cereal, but trees, and ants, and TV shows, and stray cats, and uncles, and grandpas. And they weren’t just arbitrarily there either… they were intentionally there-- on purpose, with me in mind.

Now part of growing up is learning not to be so self-centered, I know that-- but this isn’t the kind of self-centeredness that makes you selfish or insensitive. It’s the kind where you actually believe that somebody out there means the best for you. You took this from many sources as a kid-- parents, teachers, even corporations! Everybody wanted the best for you. For some reason, back then, you really believed that.

But then you grow up and get jaded-- at least I did. It’s not true... These people don’t mean the best for you. They never did. They were only using you. Often times even your own family can have issues that cloud your concept of what love means. And that tree branch that was low enough to give you a good climb…? That wasn’t for you either. None of it was for you.

The question of "why" is more important than we think, and it informs everything. The "what" question tells you there is a tree branch low enough for a good climb. The "why" question tells you that it’s for you. Absolutely! For you. This tree branch is here for you. Now didn’t that feel good just for a moment?

But there’s a flip side…

I can understand the fear of going this way. I can see why we avoid why and pay more attention to what. We’re assuming a lot here and too much subjectivism can lead to some pretty weird stuff—

The world being flat. Holy Mother Church burning people at the stake for introducing ideas that don’t coincide with good doctrine, the Bible, or whatever society happens to think at the time. If we’re all going to live in the same world we need to have the freedom to think whatever we want to about why. After all, people are going to be coming up with different answers. There may be fighting and intolerance and jihad. The crusades, the inquisition, we could go on and on. The world is full of blood because of how dangerous subjectivism can be.

But still I can’t help but notice how the "why" of things won’t leave us alone. A pure scientific point of view about everything serves society pretty well I suppose. We can’t really deal with cancer by asking why this person got it instead of that person. We should be asking what cancer is and then work at finding a way to kill it forever. But we also can’t abandon ourselves to the cold "what" of things. With "what" you might be cured of cancer, but "why" gives you the reason to live at all. And if we were forced to decide which one of these is most important (and I know we’re not but who’s to tell if we won’t be one day) I might venture to say that "why" is actually the crucial question. After all, a short life with meaning is certainly better than a long life without meaning.

Maybe you don’t agree with that. I know a lot of people who wouldn’t. But long life as a means to itself seems kind of senseless. “Man does not live by bread alone”—or to put it another way-- by merely keeping the human machine going.

So what about the "why?"

I think when most of us think of the best parts of our lives we think of those surreal years of being a kid. Why was serious stuff then—and so was joy. The truth of life can’t be found by gutting everything around you to find out how it works. That’s just the machine-- the radio that picks up the waves. But the waves are the reason for the radio.

So… why is the moon up there? Do we dare believe that it’s there merely for beauty… and that beauty was made for us to see?